Of all these things more has been written than is profitable to read. It is still too soon to know very much about the Young Turks—their real leaders, their real motives, their real aims, their real accomplishment. It is fairly safe to conclude, however, that they were neither the demigods acclaimed in 1908 as the saviours of their country nor the rascals execrated as its destroyers in 1912. They were, in all likelihood, men neither better nor worse than the rest of us, who found their country in an evil case and who for no shameful reason lacked the knowledge and the power to make it an earthly paradise. Yet it seems to me that history will give them credit for breaking the spell of Abd ül Hamid, that strange and tragic figure of myth who struggled to keep the thirteenth century alive in the twentieth. Nor do I see how they could have matched him otherwise than as they did, with his own weapon of secrecy. And whatever their subsequent mistakes may have been, it also seems to me that history will absolve them from much of the reproach of losing their European empire. No one can fairly blame them for wishing to make the Turk the dominant element in his own empire, and for wishing to make that empire independent of the foreigner. Neither they nor any one else, moreover, could in the long run have saved their European provinces. It is a serious question whether they will succeed in saving certain of their provinces that remain—or whether their own good advises them to do so. There are influences of common blood and common tradition which no mere political influence can indefinitely withstand. In any case, I have come to look upon the Turkish revolution with other than the eye of a reactionary impressionist. It would be a reactionary impressionist indeed who put the picturesqueness of Stamboul before the good of a people—and a blind one who failed to see what there was of human colour in those dramatic events. And although time has only partially fulfilled so many generous hopes, or has turned them to bitterness, I refuse to believe that they were totally insincere. I shall always count it, on the contrary, among the most enlarging experiences of my life to have been in Constantinople in 1908, and to have seen a people at one of those rare moments when it really lives. [Illustration: Badge of the revolution: “Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Equality.”]