party which followed out and developed into a finished and super-fiendish policy the dreams of Abdul Hamid.  He, as we have seen, had invented the idea of securing Ottoman supremacy in the Empire, not as before by absorption of the strength of its subject peoples, but by their extermination, and this formed part of the new programme which was to be more efficiently administered.  Already, in 1909, the experimental massacre at Adana took place, and the Young Turk party, with its possibly Liberal aims, had become a party that had as its main object a system of tyranny and murder such as the world had never seen.  Simultaneously Turkey itself, Nationalist party and all, became enslaved to German influence.  Link by link the chains were forged and the manacles welded on, and before the European War broke out in 1914, the incarceration of Turkey in Germany was complete, and Wilhelm II. had a fine revenge for the snub inflicted on him by Abdul Hamid when he proposed the scheme of German colonisation in the lands depopulated by the Armenian massacres of 1895.

From the first the aim of the Nationalists, who thus formed so deadly a blend with the Young Turk party, was Ottomanisation, or the establishment within the Empire of an Ottoman domination which should be pure and undefiled, and in which none of the subject peoples, be they Armenians or Kurds, Arabs or Greeks or Jews, Christian or Moslem, should have any part.  The inception of the scheme was no doubt inspired by the example given by Prussia’s treatment of the Poles, and Hungary’s of Roumans and Slovaks.  But in thoroughness of method Prussia’s pupil was to prove Prussia’s master, for it aimed not merely at expropriation, but extermination, and sought to become strong, not merely by weakening alien elements, but by abolishing them.  It did not set this out quite explicitly in its manifestoes and the resolutions of its congresses, but two extracts, the first from the proceedings of the ’Committee of Union and Progress,’ held in Constantinople in 1911, have a sinister suggestiveness about them for which the acts and measures of the Committee had already supplied the comment.

’The formation of new parties in the Chamber or in the country must be suppressed, and the emergence of new Liberal ideas prevented.  Turkey must become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem influence must be preponderant.  Every other religious propaganda must be suppressed....  Sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must be effected; it is clear, however, that this can never be attained by persuasion, but that we must resort to armed force....  Other nationalities must be denied the right of organisation, for decentralisation and autonomy are treason to the Turkish Empire.’

Could there be a completer reversion to the policy of Abdul Hamid, than this formal resolution, passed within three years of the time when the Young Turks deposed him?  The conviction begins to dawn on one—­as it began to dawn on the Balancers of Power—­that he owed his downfall not to his illiberal and butcherous policy, but because he was not thorough enough.