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....