and a central treasury, to ruin the Turkish Empire. With the noisy facility of the Syrian—an apelike people having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow—they speedily built up a formidable organisation. They looked outside for help, and expected freedom to come by entreaty, not by sacrifice. They corresponded with Egypt, with the Ahad (whose members, with true Mesopotamian dourness, rather despised them), with the Sherif of Mecca, and with Great Britain: everywhere seeking the ally to serve their turn. They also were deadly secret; and the Government, though it suspected their existence, could find no credible evidence of their leaders or membership. It had to hold its hand until it could strike with evidence enough to satisfy the English and French diplomats who acted as modern public opinion in Turkey. The war in 1914 withdrew these agents, and left the Turkish Government free to strike.
Mobilisation put all power into the hands of those members—Enver, Talaat and Jemal—who were at once the most ruthless, the most logical, and the most ambitious of the Young Turks. They set themselves to stamp out all non-Turkish currents in the State, especially Arab and Armenian nationalism. For the first step they found a specious and convenient weapon in the secret papers of a French Consul in Syria, who left behind him in his Consulate copies of correspondence (about Arab freedom) which had passed between him and an Arab club, not connected with the Fetah but made up of the more talkative and less formidable intelligentsia of the Syrian coast. The Turks, of course, were delighted; for “colonial” aggression in North Africa had given the French a black reputation in the Arabic-speaking Muslim world; and it served Jemal well to show his coreligionists that these Arab nationalists were infidel enough to prefer France to Turkey.
In Syria, of course, his disclosures had little novelty; but the members of the society were known and respected, if somewhat academic, persons; and their arrest and condemnation, and the crop of deportations, exiles,