than any other state of Europe. Canning's name is intimately associated with the reforms that characterised the reign of the young Sultan Abd-el-Mejid. Mahmud had inaugurated many changes, and his son had not long ascended the throne when he promulgated the famous hatti-sherif of Gülhanè, in which the persons and properties of all his subjects were guaranteed without distinction of religion or nationality. Various other reforms were promised: but it may well be doubted whether, with all the good intentions of the young sultan, many of the reforms he ordained would ever have borne fruit without the supervision of the British ambassador. In proof of this, the long and irritating negotiation which Canning conducted in 1844 with the effect of putting an end to executions for apostasy may be cited. Such barbarities were constitutional by the Ottoman law; but they were wholly opposed to the spirit of the sultan's reforming policy. Nevertheless, without the ambassador's urgent pressure, sustained long after France had given up the matter as hopeless, this peculiarly odious form of tyranny would never have been abolished in Turkey. It was his fixed belief that Turkey must be upheld in her position among European states; but he held that this could only be justified by an improved system of government. One of the chief aims he set before himself was to obtain equal rights and privileges for the christian subjects of the Porte. In the principles of Mohammedan law he was met by a stone wall of obstruction. By persistent efforts he won the abolition of the law of execution for apostasy and the formal renunciation of religious persecution by the sultan, and asserted successfully the right of christian subjects to worship after their own fashion under the protection of the government authorities. Another important point, which he carried against the whole spirit of Turkish administration, was the abolition, by special firman, of torture throughout the empire. Such concessions were not obtained without extraordinary pressure. It took years of incessant argument to induce the Porte to permit (1855) the trifling privilege of erecting a protestant church at Jerusalem; and what Canning wrote of the difficulty of bringing the Turks to reason about the claims of the Lebanon Emir Beshir applies to all similar negotiations: ‘In this case, as in any one where justice is to be done at any cost to the treasury, the Turkish government is in the habit of raising every imaginable difficulty, and it is generally found to be impossible to obtain, I will not say a satisfactory arrangement, but even a tolerable compromise, without the employment of very decided language’ (S. Canning to Aberdeen, 22 Feb. 1845, Parl. Papers, lii.) Long experience, however, and his own success at the Porte, proved the truth of this theory. In foreign affairs, Syria, which had fallen into anarchy after the expulsion of the Egyptians, was restored to tranquillity, and Persia, on the eve of hostilities, was, at Canning's instance, reconciled with the Porte by the mediation of England and Russia, and an international commission met to decide the boundary disputes. Among Canning's titles to the gratitude of Englishmen must be mentioned his steady support of the cause of discovery and exploration in the Turkish dominions. He obtained, after repeated exertions, the firman which authorised him to send Layard, at his personal expense, to Nineveh to make the famous excavations, the fruits of which were presented to the British Museum by the ambassador to whose influence and subsidies they were due, and to whom they were given by the sultan. He opened the way to the explorations at Budrum in 1846, and presented the frieze to the British Museum; and Newton's subsequent work at the mausoleum was throughout facilitated by the friendly support of Canning, who obtained the firman, advanced money, and in every way aided the explorer, in the midst of the distractions of the Crimean war (Newton, Hist. Disc. i. 80 ff.) Chesney's Euphrates expedition also owed its protection to the British ambassador (Life of Gen. F. R. Chesney, 253, 258). Many anecdotes have been preserved which show the unbounded influence which the imperious elchi exerted over Sultan Abd-el-Mejid. On one occasion, when Turkey was in sore straits for money, he observed the foundations being laid of a new summer residence on the shore of the Bosphorus; forthwith he ordered the boatmen to row him straight to the sultan's palace, where a few minutes' conversation ended in the stopping of the works. When Mohammed Aly Pasha, the minister for the navy, and brother-in-law of the sultan, had wantonly murdered a Greek concubine, Canning refused to receive the ruffian, and when the sultan sent to remonstrate with him on such conduct to his majesty's brother-in-law, he replied, ‘Tell the sultan that an English ambassador can never admit to his presence a cruel assassin.’ In the end the minister had to be dismissed from office. Canning had no mercy for cruelty and treachery; and his reputation for fierceness of temper was largely due to his unmeasured indignation against whatever was mean or dishonourable.
In the autumn of 1846 he returned to
