“Someone has got to govern Turkey; why not we?” Talaat once said to me. The situation had just about come to that. “I have been greatly disappointed,” he would tell me, “at the failure of the Turks to appreciate democratic institutions. I hoped for it once, and I worked hard for it--but they were not prepared for it.” He saw a Government which the first enterprising man who came along might seize, and he determined to be that man. Of all the Turkish politicians I met, I regarded Talaat as the only one who really had extraordinary innate ability. He had great force and dominance, the ability to think quickly and accurately, and an almost superhuman insight into men’s motives. His great geniality and his lively sense of humour also made him a splendid manager of men. He showed his shrewdness in the measures which he took, after the murder of Nazim, to gain the upper hand in this distracted Empire. He did not seize the Government all at once; he went at it gradually, feeling his way. He realised the weaknesses of his position; he had several forces to deal with: the envy of his associates on the revolutionary committee which had backed him, the army, the foreign Governments, and the several factions that made up what then passed for public opinion in Turkey. Any of these elements might destroy him, politically and physically. He understood the dangerous path he was treading, and he always anticipated a violent death. “I do not expect to die in my bed,” he told me. By becoming Minister of the Interior, Talaat gained control of the police and the administration of the provinces, or vilayets. This gave him a great amount of patronage, which he used to strengthen his position with the Committee. He attempted to gain the support of all influential factions by gradually placing their representatives in the other Cabinet posts. Though he afterwards became the man who was chiefly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, at this time Talaat maintained the pretence that the Committee stood for the unionisation of all the races in the Empire, and for this reason his first Cabinet contained an Arab-Christian, a Deunme (a Jew by race, but a Mohammedan by religion), a Circassian, an Armenian, an Egyptian. He made the latter Grand Vizier, the highest post in the Government, a position which roughly corresponds to that of Chancellor in the German Empire. The man whom he selected for this part, which in ordinary times was the most dignified and important in the Empire, belonged to quite a different order of society from Talaat. Not uncommonly bosses in America select high-class figure-heads for mayors or even governors, men who will give respectability to their faction yet whom, at the same time, they think that they can control. It was some such motive as this which led Talaat and his associates to elevate Saïd Halim to the Grand Vizierate. Saïd Halim was an Egyptian Prince, the