The gap between the rescript and the ground is the substance of the historical argument about it. Some of it was implemented and lasted. Mixed courts were established, a commercial and a penal code followed on European models, non-Muslims entered the administration in numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier, and the community constitutions were drafted, the Armenian one in 1863 being the most elaborate.
Other parts were not. Conscription of non-Muslims was repeatedly deferred and the payment in lieu became a straightforward continuation of the old tax under a new name. Testimony rules changed on paper faster than in provincial practice. The clause implying freedom to change religion, which followed from the earlier abolition of the death penalty for apostasy, was never enforced against Muslim opinion, and a subject who left Islam remained at risk. Intercommunal violence in Ottoman Syria in 1860 killed thousands within four years of the promise of security.
The rescript was also read at the time as having been extracted. It appeared under the pressure of allied powers whose armies had just defended the empire, and Muslim opinion in several provinces treated it as a foreign imposition, which made its implementation harder. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 carried its principles forward on paper; the empire itself ended in 1922, and the instrument went with the state that made it.