The early Young Turk Period in late Ottoman Empire witnessed that many individuals from different provinces and ethnic-religious and social-economic backgrounds petition the higher state bodies, particularly the Sublime Porte, against the practice of torture. Through the prism of these petitions which are housed in the Prime Ministry Archives, Istanbul, and primarily by relying on the common and consistent language they employed, I suggest that the legal ban on torture was then a significant domain through which people commonly pursued the negotiation of political power. At the same time, this group of petitions suggests the existence of a widespread political consciousness across the society with regard to certain principles which the petitioners associated with the legal ban on torture, namely, the rule of law, individual rights and equality. More significantly, and through a closer reading of the petitions’ common language, I argue that for ordinary people from all around the empire the legal ban on torture embodied all the promises of the new regime based on which the Young Turks called themselves revolutionary. In other words, ordinary people commonly perceived the practice of torture as the yardstick for whether or not the “revolution” actually took steps towards creating a new beginning. Indeed, in this respect they attached a symbolic meaning to the practice of torture. Particularly because they were written at a time when the new regime was anxious to consolidate political authority and intensely concerned for legitimacy, these petitions used a highly political language and carefully employed the revolutionary discourse of the Young Turks to call on the ruling authorities. Most significantly, they often counterposed the notions of law, justice and rights to despotism, in a manner that goes much beyond rhetoric. As one can see by looking closely at how they commonly associated torture with despotism, it was significantly through the question of torture that ordinary people made sense of such abstract principles as the rule of law and equality. Indeed, reading between the lines of these petitions, one can further see why the practice of torture characterizes a despotic regime and is essentially contradictory to the rule of law and individual rights. Finally, I suggest that torture had such a meaningful significance for ordinary people because it was the one practice whereby people perhaps most obviously encountered the arbitrary exercise of state authority. It thus offers unique pathways to more comprehensively understand the late Ottoman reform.