among themselves.  The Arab-speaking societies complained of under-representation in the councils and offices of the state, and made no secret of their intention not to be assimilated by the Turk-speaking Osmanlis.  To all suggestions, however, of local home-rule and conciliation of particularist societies in the empire, the Committee was deaf.  Without union, it believed in no progress, and by union it understood the assimilation of all societies in the empire to the Osmanli.

Logic was on the side of the Committee in its choice of both end and means.  In pan-Ottomanism, if it could be effected, lay certainly the single chance of restoring Osmanli independence and power to anything like the position they had once held.  In rule by a militarist oligarchy for some generations to come, lay the one hope of realizing the pan-Ottoman idea and educating the resultant nation to self-government.  That end, however, it was impossible to realize under the circumstances in which past history had involved the Ottoman Empire.  There was too much bad blood between different elements of its society which Osmanli rulers had been labouring for centuries rather to keep apart than to unite; and certain important elements, both Moslem and Christian, had already developed too mature ideas of separate nationality.  With all its defects, however, the new order did undoubtedly rest on a wider basis than the old, and its organization was better conceived and executed.  It retained some of the sympathy of Europe which its beginnings had excited, and the western powers, regarding its representative institutions as earnests of good government, however ill they might work at the first, were disposed to give it every chance.

Unfortunately the Young Turks were in a hurry to bring on their millennium, and careless of certain neighbouring powers, not formidable individually but to be reckoned with if united, to whom the prospect of regenerated Osmanlis assimilating their nationals could not be welcome.  Had the Young Turks been content to put their policy of Ottomanization in the background for awhile, had they made no more than a show of accepting local distinctions of creed and politics, keeping in the meantime a tight rein on the Old Turks, they might long have avoided the union of those neighbours, and been in a better position to resist, should that union eventually be arrayed against themselves.

But a considerable and energetic element among them belonged to the nervous Levantine type of Osmanli, which is as little minded to compromise as any Old Turk, though from a different motive.  It elected to deal drastically and at once with Macedonia, the peculiar object not only of European solicitude but also of the interest of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece.  If ever a province required delicate handling it was this.  It did not get it.  The interested neighbours, each beset by fugitives of its oppressed nationals, protested only to be ignored or browbeaten.