selves without attracting the attention of spies; the company commanders used also to deliver lectures to their men in out-of-the-way places, where any stranger would be conspicuous and Palace spies would be immediately recognised. Whenever a spy was discovered he promptly disappeared, soldiers who had taken the oath of fealty to the Committee being given the word to kill him. At last the whole Macedonian army was won over to the cause of the Young Turks, and as a consequence of the work performed by the disguised officers in other parts of the Empire, the Second Army Corps, which garrisons the Vilayet of Adrianople, also contained a large proportion of officers and men in sympathy with the movement -troops hostile to the Despotism thus enclosing the capital on all sides-while on the further shore of the Bosphorus, Anatolia, whose sturdy peasantry supplies the Ottoman Empire with its finest troops, had been similarly prepared by Dr. Nazim Bey and numerous officers.

To those Englishmen who knew something of the Turkish army it appeared an amazing thing that these soldiers, who worshipped the Sultan with a blind faith not only as their sovereign, but as the head of the one true religion, "the Commander of the Faithful," "the Shadow of God upon earth," -however discontented they might be, however ready to mutiny, as they sometimes did mutiny, against their officers-could be persuaded to join

in a movement of which the avowed object was the deposition of the Sultan Abdul Hamid. The soldier could only be won over by convincing him that religion itself commanded the overthrow of the tyrant, It will be remembered how, in 1876, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, as chief of the interpreters of the Sacred Law, decreed that the Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz should be deposed because, in ruining the State which God had confided to him, he had broken his sacred trust, and could no longer be head of the believers. The young officers put the case in the same way, and in simple words, to the honest and devout soldiery; they quoted the passages in the Koran which denounce tyranny, and showed that the Sultan was not true to his country, and therefore had forfeited the privileges God had lent to him. The fact that Austria and Germany had been granted concessions to construct railways through Turkish territory (the proposed railway through the Sanjak of Novi-Bazaar, which would afford Austria railway connection with Salonica, and the German-owned Bagdad railway) was a proof to the soldier that the Palace was selling the country bit by bit to the foreigner.

During the early days of the propaganda, hodjas who had joined the Committee, and officers disguised as hodjas, being freely admitted into barracks in their capacity of preachers, advocated these doctrines, and satisfied the religious scruples of the men; and when, later, the Sheikh-ul-Islam

declared himself in favour of the Constitution, there remained no doubt in their minds that they were acting as their creed commanded in following the lead of their young officers. As a matter of fact, it was not difficult to show that Abdul Hamid, to quote from Mr. Hamil Halid's book, The Diary of a Young Turk, was "the worst enemy of Islam, as no Moslem ruler has ever brought by his misdeeds so much shame upon the faith as he has. Any one who has observed his career closely, knows that his actions are diametrically opposed to the principles of the Mussulman law and creed." Moreover, the Turkish soldier, like the soldiers in other armies and the majority of healthy young men, can be appealed to through his stomach, and he naturally acquired an affection for and confidence in these majors, captains and lieutenants of the new school who sympathised with him, pitied his wretched condition, and with their own money, or the Committee funds, supplemented his miserable rations and supplied him with comforts.

Of the methods of the propaganda in Macedonia we learn a good deal from the published letters of Major Niazi Bey, the officer who first raised the standard of revolt. He explains how, gradually, the young officers, hitherto estranged from one another by the mutual suspicions engendered by the system of espionage, were emboldened by the patriotic hopes held up before them, and through

the possession of a common secret became as a band of brothers, mutual confidence and affection increasing daily; and how even those who had not been made members of the secret Society, and knew not its mysteries, were convinced by their affiliated comrades that the Committee was powerful and just, and was working in the sacred name of liberty for the integrity of the fatherland and so sympathised heart and soul with the movement, and were in readiness to co-operate with the revolutionaries.

In the meanwhile the Committee was steadily undermining the entire civil as well as military administration of the Empire. It acted, as a member of the association put it to me, like a well-ordered but secret Government. It kept books in which were inscribed the names of all the higher Government officials, with particulars as to their careers and habits their dossiers, in short. Some of the enlightened and right-minded of these officials had been gained over to the cause; the others were closely watched, and whether they were Valis, Inspectors General, or Governors of districts, or what not, their moral influence was destroyed, and their authority was made impotent by the fact that their subordinates, on whom they had to rely for the execution of their wishes, had almost without exception become adherents of the Committee.

CHAPTER IX

How the revolution was precipitated-The Committee's manifesto to the Great Powers-The Reval MeetingEfforts of the Palace to crush the revolutionary movement-The Spy Commission-The Committee condemns to death the agents of the Palace-Nazim Bey attempts to unearth the secret Committee-Ismail Pasha's Commission-An army is despatched from Asia Minor.

IT had been calculated by the Young Turks that the time would not be ripe for their great coup until the autumn of 1909, but the menace of further foreign intervention in Macedonia and an active campaign against the Committee, which was opened by the Palace at the beginning of 1908, precipitated the revolt. The propaganda had been spreading rapidly, the movement had been prospering, when suddenly the prospect darkened, and there were happenings that threatened even to break up the Society and shatter the hopes of the reformers.

It became known to the Committee that the British Government had decided to withdraw from that "Concert of Europe," which had failed so signally in dealing with the question of reforms in Macedonia, and that England and Russia were now going to work together to introduce a most