r their goods and houses, and as the
convoys of exiles passed through the villages the best-looking women and
children were sold cheap or even given away for nothing to the Turkish
peasantry. Naturally the Turkish people accepted the good things the
Government offered them, and naturally this reconciled them momentarily
to the War.

Thus in the Armenian atrocities the Young Turks made Panislamism and
Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of
their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist
gaining ground.

"After the deposition of Abd-ul-Hamid," writes the German authority
quoted above, "the Committee of Union and Progress reverted more and
more to the ex-Sultan's policy. To begin with, a rigorous party tyranny
was set up. A power behind the Government got the official executive
apparatus into its hand, and the elections to Parliament ceased to be
free. The appointment of the highest officials in the Empire and of all
the most important servants of the administration was settled by decrees
of the Committee. All bills had to be debated first by the Committee and
to receive its approval before they came before the Chamber. Public
policy was determined by two main considerations: (1) The centralistic
idea, which claimed for the Turkish race not merely preponderant but
exclusive power in the Empire, was to be carried to its logical
consequences; (2) The Empire was to be established on a purely Islamic
foundation. Turkish Nationalism and the Panislamic Idea precluded _a
priori_ any equality of treatment for the various races and religions of
the Empire, and any movement which looked for the salvation of the
Empire in the decentralisation or autonomy of its various parts was
branded as high treason. The nationalistic and centralistic tendency was
directed not merely against the various non-Mohammedan nationalities
--Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and Jews--but also against the
non-Turkish Mohammedan nations--Arabs, Mohammedan Syrians, Kurds,
and the Shia element in the population. An idol of 'Pan-Turkism' was
erected, and all non-Turkish elements in the population were subjected
to the harshest measures. The rigorous action which this policy
prescribed against the Albanians, who were mostly Mohammedans and had
been thorough loyalists till then, led to the loss of almost the whole
of European Turkey. The same policy has provoked insurrections in the
Arab half of the Empire, whic