ontrols the material which she then
worked on.

The troubled years of the Balkan wars which followed this false dawn,
coupled with the loss of all the territory which remained to the Ottoman
Empire in Europe, with the exception of Thrace, caused an immediate
reaction from the open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we decide to
credit them at the outset with a sincere purpose. Organisation by a
slightly different spelling became Ottomanisation, and the aims of the
Young Turks were identified with those of the Nationalist 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