After the military defeat of autumn, 1918, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress who had governed the Ottoman Empire since 1905 disappeared, and the statesmen of the former régime came into office again. In the very first days of October, 1918, the Talaat Pasha Cabinet had offered its resignation, which had not been accepted at first by the Sultan. The new Ottoman Cabinet made a declaration of policy to Parliament on Wednesday, October 23, 1918. In the opening address, read by the Grand Vizier Izzet Pasha, an amnesty was promised to all political offenders. Turkey stated she was quite ready to accept a peace, based on Mr. Wilson’s fourteen points, and to grant at once to all the elements of the population, without any distinction of nationality or religion, full political rights and the right to a share in the administration of the country. She also promised to solve the question of the Arabian vilayets, to take into consideration their national aspirations, and to grant them an autonomous administration, provided the bonds existing between them, the Caliphate, and the Sultan, should be maintained. The whole Chamber, with the exception of ten deputies who refused to vote, passed a vote of confidence in the new Cabinet. After the French victory in the East and the capitulation of Bulgaria, the political changes, which had already begun in Turkey, soon became quite pronounced. Talaat Pasha, whose ideas differed utterly from those of Enver Pasha, and who had more and more confined his activity to the war department, had gradually lost his influence over the policy of the Empire since the death of Mehmed V. After having taken his share, together with Enver and Jemal, in bringing Turkey into the war by the side of the Central Powers in 1914, he now realised that the game was up. Besides, the Ottoman Press now openly attacked the Cabinets of the two Empires, and reproached them with neglecting the interests of the Porte when the additional treaty of Brest-Litovsk was drafted, during the negotiations of Bukharest, and later on in the course of the negotiations with the Cabinet of Sofia. Talaat, Javid, and Enver sought shelter in Berlin. Their flight greatly affected the new Constantinople Government on account of some financial malversations which had occurred while the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress were in office. So the Sublime Porte in December, 1918, demanded their extradition, which Germany refused to grant. In April, 1919, Talaat, who lived in Berlin under the name of Sali Ali Bey, and who later on opened a public-house in that city, was sentenced to death by default in Constantinople, and a year later, in March, 1920, England, according to a clause of the Versailles treaty, put him down on the list of the war-criminals[14] whose extradition might be demanded. Footnotes: 10: _L’Éclair:_ “Comment le Goeben et le Breslau échappèrent aux flottes alliées,” by Henry Miles, June 16, 1921.