But Abdul Hamid was not going to accept the new regime without another effort to regain his old control. The following winter, after the Parliament had met, he gathered together his old supporters and, having made sure that he could count on the loyalty of the garrison in Constantinople, suddenly abolished all that he had proclaimed and declared the old regime restored. Then Mahmud Shevket Pasha, the military leader of the Young Turks, established himself in Macedonia and called on all the people to support him. The events which followed will ever rank as among the most dramatic and picturesque of recent Turkish history. First of all the fighting bands of the committee, which had already laid down their arms, reorganized again and came down from the mountains to join Shevket's army. At their head marched Yani Sandanski, the leader of the committee and the hated enemy of Prince Ferdinand. The comitajis, however, were not the only ones to respond. When Shevket finally began to march on the capital, he had in his army whole brigades of Greeks, Jews, Vlachs as well as Turks and Bulgars. When this army finally appeared outside the gates of Constantinople, the sultan and his soldiers realized that all was lost, but it was now too late to temporize again. A large force was sent in to disarm the garrison and to drag Abdul Hamid off his throne. And at the very head of that force, together with a hundred of his best men, marched Yani Sandanski, the abductor of Miss Stone, the slayer of Prince Ferdinand's chief conspirator in Macedonia, Boris Sarafoff, the brigand chief who represented the people of Macedonia, but had been outlawed in every Balkan State. What could be more symbolical of the partnership between the Macedonia Committee and Young Turkey than that Yani Sandanski should be one of those who were to drag Abdul Hamid off his throne and send him a prisoner to Saloniki? At that moment, and for some months after, it looked indeed as though this union of previously antagonistic elements in European Turkey would effectually balk all the intrigues, not only of the little Balkan States, but of Austria and Russia as well. Nothing could have been more disappointing to the tribe of diplomats than this unexpected turn of events. Undoubtedly most of the Young Turk leaders were sincere and really wished to establish a new Ottoman Empire based on a broad citizenship of all its peoples and the elimination of religious and racial differences from politics. Many of them were out-and-out Socialists, as was Yani Sandanski himself, who saw far-off visions of a great European, if not a world, confederation which should banish war entirely from the earth.