Consulate, was disguised in a suit of slops such as sailormen wear, and when the opportunity arrived quietly walked away from the carefully watched Consulate in the company of an English merchant captain, satisfied the questioning police spies on the quay, and boarded the British vessel that was to carry him to safety; for he had been entered on the ship's books as cook, and was provided with the necessary consular document that testified to his having signed articles in that capacity. Oftentimes, too, some British steamer passing down the Bosphorus would stop her engines and, under cover of the darkness, send off the friendly boat that, by pre-arrangement, would take a party of fugitive Turks from off a lonely beach, and so save them from the oubliette or the strangler's cord.

The Palace employed terrorism in Turkey and corruption in Paris in its attempt to destroy the Young Turk association. By offers of rewards and high positions, some of the members were persuaded to desert the cause and to return to Turkey. Some were found base enough to serve as spies. Thus, one, whose name it is perhaps better not to mention, contrived to work himself into a prominent position on the Paris Committee, learnt its secrets, and returned to Constantinople to betray them to the Sultan. But the organisation ever grew stronger under persecution, and patriotic Turks supplied the funds which enabled

it to carry on its propaganda. The Paris Committee published a paper and numerous tracts, which exposed the iniquities of the Hamidian régime and called for the deposition of the Sultan, and these were smuggled into Turkey and were widely distributed and read, despite the vigilance of the ever-increasing army of spies. The agents of the Committee in Constantinople used to placard the city under cover of the night with revolutionary appeals, and seditious placards threatening the life of the Sultan were sometimes placed upon the walls of the Palace itself. Abdul Hamid, living in perpetual fear, redoubled his precautions.

In 1901 the Sultan, having been informed by his ambassador in Paris that the Paris Committee was preparing a great Young Turkey demonstration in Constantinople itself, was so anxious to intercept the correspondence that was passing between Paris and the members of the Young Turkey party in his capital that he violated his international agreements by seizing and breaking open the European mail-bags that were addressed to the various foreign post offices in Constantinople, and thereby provoked the Powers to threaten a joint naval demonstration, which was only warded off by a humble apology and further solemn promises on Abdul Hamid's part.

In Paris, the "Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress," to give the association the now world-famous name which it assumed a few years

ago, was ably directed by Ahmed Riza Bey, who, having worked with devotion for the cause through eighteen years of exile, returned to Turkey after the proclamation of the Constitution last year, and is now the President, or Speaker, of the Turkish Chamber of Deputies. The Committee was also strengthened during the last few years of the Hamidian régime by the admission to it of several distinguished Turks of high rank, who fled from Constantinople to Paris so as to be able to assist the national movement from that safe vantageground. Among these fugitives was the Sultan's relative, Prince Sabah-ed-din, who threw himself heart and soul into the revolutionary movement, and advocated a policy more advanced and radical than that favoured by the large majority of the Young Turks, whose Liberalism is full-blooded Toryism when compared to what passes for Liberalism in England in these latter days. Prince Sabah-ed-din is an advanced home ruler, and he is the virtual leader of the "Liberal Union" party, which is working for a degree of centralisation that is regarded as dangerous by most Mussulmans, but is naturally pleasing to the Greeks.

But though these Turkish gentlemen, with their clever conversation and their charming manners, were welcomed in Paris salons and London draw

ing-rooms, few people in Europe realised that the Young Turkey movement had the remotest chance

of attaining its ends; for it was a silent movement, and while the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians voiced their grievances with a persistence that gained for them a wide hearing and much sympathy, the patriotic Turks, unwilling to invoke the help of foreigners, took no steps to make their aspirations known in Europe. Ahmed Riza did, indeed, come over to London in 1904, and, for the first time in his life, addressed a meeting of Englishmen, but it was not to crave sympathy for the Mussulman Turks whom he represented, but to express the sentiments of his party regarding foreign intervention in Turkey, whether it were that of a Government or of the English humanitarian committees. In the course of his speech Ahmed Bey, while admitting the justice of a revolt against despotism, condemned the European friends of Armenia and Macedonia for wrongfully and artificially inciting a rising, and so playing the part of the Pan-Slavist agents, and he practically put it that by fomenting insurrection among the Christian populations in Turkey they were more or less responsible for the massacres which followed. The meeting, to quote from the official report, "became extremely agitated, and many interruptions were addressed to the speaker." The speakers who followed had some unkind things to say concerning Ahmed Riza and the Young Turks. Here is a quotation from the speech of an influential humanitarian who was

present. "I am not sorry that the gentleman has spoken, because it shows us how impossible it is to expect any reforms in Turkey from the Young Turkish party. They are only thinking of themselves. The liberties of the Christians would be just as unsafe under a Sultan with the sentiments of the gentleman who has just sat down, as under the present Sultan."

And yet, even at that time, Ahmed Riza and his Mussulman associates were planning a scheme which was intended to bring liberty, justice, and security to the oppressed Christian subjects of the Porte, and was, moreover, destined to prove successful where all the diplomacy of the Powers and the too often misdirected efforts of the humanitarians in Europe had signally failed. For the Young Turks, like their great forerunner, Midhat Pasha, realised that Turkey could only be saved from disintegration by placing all her races and creeds on an equality, by giving the same rights to all. They therefore set themselves to bring about a co-operation of the various elements of the Turkish population, and to make common cause with the Armenian, Bulgarian, and other revolutionary non-Mussulman committees in Paris.

It appeared, to those who heard of it, as being the most chimerical of schemes; for the Young Turks and their proposed allies had but one aspiration in common-the overthrow of the