a raison d'être and should be dissolved at once. It was pointed out that an irresponsible power behind the Parliament was unconstitutional, and that the Committee, with its unknown leaders, had become an illegal institution now that Turkey had been granted representative government.

Now surely this argument savours of a legal pedantry that ignores surrounding conditions. The Committee was, of course, an illegal institution from its inception; it saved Turkey by illegal methods; a revolution cannot but be an illegal operation and it would be obviously unsafe on the morrow of a successful revolution-when a nation is still in confusion, when the people have yet no idea how they should exercise their new rights, when the new institutions from their very freedom lie open to the attack of cunning foesto adhere strictly to constitutional technicalities and legalities, and to break up the strong organised power that has brought about the overthrow of a régime. After our own revolution Cromwell had no scruples in violating law to save a cause. If there had been a strong Committee of Union and Progress behind the Constitution which the Sultan swore to observe on his coming to the throne, Turkey might have been saved thirty years of despotism and the loss of much territory. The Young Turks fully realised the difficulties and dangers before them. Many were the foes of

the newly freed fatherland.

There were those of

the Great Powers to whom constitutional liberty in Turkey meant interference with their designs to enrich themselves and obtain territorial expansion at Turkey's expense; there were the smaller Powers on the frontier, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, eager to scramble over the partition of Macedonia; and, far more dangerous than these, there were the Turkish reactionaries, who began to intrigue everywhere against the Constitution immediately after its proclamation, ready to seize their chance when they saw it. The Young Turks in their hour of triumph had freely pardoned all save a few of the worst of the creatures of the Palace, but this great clemency gained them no gratitude. It was also a source of no small danger that the Young Turks, having but few trained administrators in their own ranks, had retained the services of such high officials of the old régime as had no notoriously evil records for corruption or oppression. Some of these men are the secret enemies of the new order of things. The Young Turks, therefore, determined to remain on their guard and see to it that Turkey's newly won liberty was not wrested from her. As I have stated in a previous chapter, they held that, far from losing its raison d'être on the opening of Parliament, the Committee of Union and Progress would be more necessary than ever for the protection of the country, and they decided not to dissolve this powerful organisation, but to maintain it, legally

or illegally, supported as heretofore by the army, until such time as the Constitution should be firmly established. Such was their justification, and they were sincere in their explanations of their resolution.

As will have been gathered from what I have said in this book the Committee of Union and Progress is no small body of patriots. When I was in Turkey it numbered seventy thousand members. I understand that it now has a membership of about a hundred thousand. It includes all that is best and most patriotic of the educated young Moslem manhood of the country. There are now the many Christians, too, on the Committee who have rejected the idle separatist aspirations of their several races and have Ottoman unity as their ideal, and also many of those Jews who from the beginning have co-operated loyally with the Young Turks. When I was in the country last autumn it looked much as if this Committee had as its members nearly all the men to whom it would be safest to leave the guidance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, it seems to be an undoubted fact that the Committee of Union and Progress has made many enemies even among those who cannot be accused of reactionary tendencies. The Committee has undoubtedly done some illadvised and tactless things, and its arbitrary methods have raised up against itself some

relentless foes; but there can, I think, be no doubt that it has been actuated throughout by pure and patriotic motives, and that its errors have been those of zeal and inexperience. I have met several members of the party recently, and they all sincerely believe that the Committee had very good reasons for compelling Kiamil Pasha to resign the Grand Vizierate in February last; they are confident that the aged statesman had been misled by the plausible enemies of Turkey's liberties and was being duped by reactionaries. The friction between the Committee and the Grand Vizier commenced some months before the opening of the Parliament; Kiamil, being a Pasha of the old school, naturally resented the dictation of the Committee, and complained that while his was the responsibility the Committee held all the power. The Committee was alarmed by Kiamil Pasha's friendly relations with the Liberal Union, the party in opposition to the Committee, and recognised the insidious work of reactionary influence when Kiamil despatched from Constantinople to Macedonia certain battalions that were faithful to the Committee, thus imperilling, in the eyes of the Young Turks, the safety of the constitutional cause in the capital. When the Grand Vizier, without consultation with his ministers or with the party, suddenly dismissed the Ministers of War and Marine, the nominees of the Committee,

and placed others in their stead, the crisis was precipitated. The Young Turks, above all things, were determined that those in whom they did not place implicit confidence should not control the army, so the Committee, even as it had compelled the resignation of Said Pasha, because he had left the appointment of the Ministers of War and Marine in the hands of the Sultan, now insisted upon the resignation of Kiamil Pasha, and effected its purpose in so peremptory a way that it lost much of its popularity with the people and afforded its unscrupulous enemies a handle for attack. The intrigues connected with the fall of Kiami Pasha need not be discussed here; but one gathers that the man chiefly to blame is Kiamil's own son, Said, a worthless person who enriched himself by co-operating with the brigands in the neighbourhood of Smyrna. On several previous occasions he has compromised by his intrigues his aged father, the one person in Turkey who believes that there is no real harm in this very bad specimen of a young Turkish gentleman. Of Kiamil Pasha's successor to the Grand Vizierate, Hilmi Pasha, I have already spoken.

The Committee justified its treatment of Kiamil Pasha and its other arbitrary acts by pleading the necessity of protecting the nation against the strong reactionary forces which certainly do exist, despite the assertions of the organs of