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terms offered to them. These terms amounted to a complete surrender on the part of the Committee. The rebels were promised all that they had demanded from the first: not to be liable to military service outside Albania except in the capital, to be exempt from taxation for two years and to have certain taxes lowered, to be allowed to carry arms, to be governed by native officials according to their tribal laws and customs, to have local revenues devoted to local needs-roads, bridges, and schools in which Albanian should be the vehicle of instruction. Further, the Porte undertook to rebuild the destroyed houses and churches, and to furnish every adult refugee with a sum of money in compensation for losses suffered through the action of its troops.

By these tardy and humiliating concessions the Committee managed, for a time, to stave off the danger of foreign intervention attended by domestic complications; but for a time only. The Young Turks had no intention to fulfil the promises wrung from them. To take back with one hand what he has been forced to give with the other has always been, and still is, a cardinal feature of the Turk's statecraft. Besides, a recognition of Albanian particularism would create a precedent of which all the other nationalities would take advantage in order to press their own claims; and that would mean a radical inversion of the programme upon which the Committee had staked everything. The Albanians, on their part, embittered by repeated deception and emboldened by partial success, were not likely to tolerate any infringement of the privileges they had regained at so great a cost of blood. Consequently the peace patched up proved a hollow truce; and there is every reason to believe that the trouble will break out again in the near future. And, when it recurs, the movement will probably be still wider in its extent, better organised in its conduct, and more exacting in its aims. Already there are among the Albanian leaders men who declare themselves far from satisfied with mere administrative decentralisation, and who dream of political independence. A secret revolutionary organisation, the Dritta,' is working vigorously towards that end.

To the Arabian and Albanian questions the new rulers of Turkey have added a Kurdish question. The Kurds,

like the Albanians, were conciliated by Abdul Hamid by a variety of diplomatic expedients. The tribal chiefs were systematically bribed with gifts, decorations, and lucrative posts in the civil and military services and in the palace; and the Sultan had no more devoted defenders of his person than the Albanian and Kurdish bodyguards. The Young Turks have succeeded in estranging the Kurds, as they have estranged the Albanians. The Druses of the Lebanon also, who throughout Abdul Hamid's reign had remained quiescent, rose in 1910 in a rebellion which ended in a pacification hardly more durable than that of Albania. But these forces of discontent do not by any means exhaust the dangers which the Young Turks have created for themselves.

The Armenians, like the other nationalities, had greeted the revolution with an extravagant enthusiasm which soon yielded to painful experience. The elections revealed the manner in which the Committee meant to redeem its pledges of equal treatment. But that was not all. After the massacres of 1896 the lands of many Armenians who had fled the country, and of many others who had stayed behind, were appropriated by Kurdish and other Mohammedan robbers. On the proclamation of the Constitution the refugees returned home, and, together with the other dispossessed Armenians, demanded the restitution of their property as well as the cessation of the tribute which their Kurdish neighbours have been in the habit of levying, from time immemorial, on the defenceless Armenian peasantry. The only fruit of this cry for elementary justice has been the appointment of a commission of enquiry. And, as though this perpetuation of ancient wrongs were not enough, in April 1909 the wretched Armenians suffered, under the Constitution, a massacre almost as terrible as any they had suffered under the autocracy-18,000 persons slaughtered, over 2,000 women and children doomed to shame, and a vast crowd of men, women and children left without the means of subsistence.

In Macedonia the unscrupulous chauvinism of the Committee has led to an equally dangerous recrudescence of old discontents. The Young Turks, aware of the hostility they have aroused among the Christian inhabitants, have endeavoured to disarm them while

arming the Turkish inhabitants, to plant in Christian districts a Mohammedan population consisting of emigrants from Bosnia, and to organise among the true believers bands of terrorists. The disarmament of the Bulgars of Macedonia was carried out with a brutality worthy of the worst traditions of Abdul Hamid, many peasants being flogged to death and others maimed for life. The suppression of the Greeks both in Macedonia and other parts of the Empire was attempted chiefly through a commercial boycott which has brought ruin on many private individuals without either benefiting the public treasury or quelling the nationalist spirit of the Greeks. Simultaneously with these acts of repression there has been proceeding, during the last two years, a systematic assassination of prominent members of the Bulgarian and Greek communities culminating in Macedonia in the recent murder of two Greek bishops.

The upshot has been a revival of the revolutionary agitation which had nearly caused the loss of the province on the eve of the Constitution. The Bulgarian organisation has resumed its old tactics; and we hear every now and then of collisions between insurgent bands and Imperial troops, of railway outrages, and other exploits of a kind familiar under the old régime. What is more significant still is that the Bulgarian and Greek elements, once mortally hostile, have been compelled by the pressure of a common danger to sink their mutual animosities in a common hostility towards the Turk. Their respective organisations have agreed on joint action when the moment for action comes. Meanwhile the Greek Patriarch and the Bulgarian Exarch, after forty years' bitter estrangement, have been reconciled and, together with the Armenian Patriarch, are striving to defend the Christian population from Young Turk aggression. For, apart from the special grievances of each nationality already enumerated, they all have in common one which is due to the universal conscription established by the Constitution. In this ostensible privilege-once confined to Mohammedansthe Christians see, and not unjustly, but another instrument of racial fusion under the mask of racial equality. The Christian recruits labour under all sorts of disabilities; and in many cases even ordinary religious toleration is denied them.

Such have hitherto been the results of the constitutional experiment. A stratocracy has arisen on the ruins of the autocracy. The palace camarilla has found in the Salonica Committee a successor as unscrupulous and intolerant as itself. Whoever dares to speak or write against the Committee is either summarily punished by court-martial or, if he is the possessor of dangerous knowledge, he is assassinated. Under this tyranny administrative confusion has grown worse confounded. The public finances are in a more hopeless muddle than ever. Peculation still reigns supreme; and not only has the old gulf that separated the conqueror from the conquered become wider, but new combinations undreamt of by the old régime have been created. The Committee, while displaying all the intolerance and incompetence of the despotism to whose omnipotence it has succeeded, lacks the Machiavellian astuteness by which that despotism managed to keep its opponents divided and its supporters united. Abdul Hamid consistently sided with the Mohammedans in their oppression of the Christians, and assiduously fomented among the latter the feuds which rendered their opposition impotent. The actual rulers of Turkey have achieved this unique result-to divide the Mohammedans, and to unite the Christians. Arab, Albanian and Kurd have no longer any reason to side with the Turks, who are now themselves divided into Young and Old; while, on the other hand, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars and Armenians have come to see that they can only survive by union of forces. This novel development goes further. The Moslem Albanians have abandoned their hereditary hatred of the Slav, and in their recent insurrection they have been aided by the Bulgarian revolutionary organisation. The warm welcome which the Orthodox Serbs of Montenegro have extended to Catholic and Moslem Albanian refugees is another proof of the tendency to wipe out the memory of ancient enmities, and to cement new friendships.

At the same time, the Committee has ceased to present a united front to the numerous enemies it has raised on all sides. Its violent methods and personal rivalries have estranged many of its original members. When Kiamil Pasha was driven from power at the beginning of 1909, General Chérif Pasha, one of the most enlightened Young

Turks, felt obliged to resign his membership, to leave Constantinople, and to retire to Paris, where he formed an independent party of malcontents, the liberal programme of which is advocated vigorously through its organ 'Mécheroutiette.' In Turkey itself there have sprung into existence several other Young Turk groups, some in open hostility to the Committee, some still nominally within the pale, but in opposition to Salonican influences. The most important of these is the group of 'Insurgents consisting of a number of officers and others who demand the abolition of secret political societies and who, perceiving that the chauvinistic policy of Salonica menaces the integrity of the Empire, advocate a return to the more pacific policy of the pre-revolution days.

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The violent scenes which the Turkish Chamber has recently witnessed, the savage altercations between the journalistic supporters of the rival groups, the periodical murders of military officers and newspaper editors, throw an ominous light on the bitterness which divides the Young Turks, while the instability of the edifice reared by the revolution is sufficiently illustrated by the rapid rise and fall of Cabinets. Since July 1908, Turkey has had seven Ministries and an endless succession of ministerial crises. And, while the Young Turks are thus daily losing the strength that comes from cohesion and the prestige that springs from public approval, the Old Turks are reinforced. The Constitution, with its tacit denial of the theocratic conception of the State, has never been popular among the masses of the Turkish nation. The excesses which the Salonica clique has perpetrated and the fear lest, if allowed to go on in the path it has chosen to enter, it may bring about the collapse of the Empire which the revolution was intended to avert, have compelled even many Young Turks to reconsider their views. And now both moderate Young Turks and Old Turks find themselves approaching an agreement in a common conviction that even Abdul Hamid may be outdone, and a common wish to see the monarchy restored to, at least, a portion of its old power. They do not desire a return to Hamidian absolutism, but they would like to see the Sultan invested with greater authority, and the Chamber turned into a merely consultative body.

There is yet another source of Turkish discontent-the

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