And here Niazi passes out of this story. I have given a somewhat full account of his wanderings, as the narrative will make clear the nature of the work that was done all over the country by those whose mission it was to gain the adherence of the civil population to the revolutionary cause; and I think that it also shows that those virtues without which no people can be great or worthy of any respect—patriotism, and the readiness to sacrifice self for a high ideal—are possessed in a high degree by the Moslem Turks. Niazi was the first young officer to take to the mountains, and it was to his lot that the most important work fell; but it needed many others like him to make the insurrection so universal as it was. Enver Bey and dozens of other young officers were doing the same work as Niazi and with like success in other parts of the country. The local Committees, too, appear to have been wonderfully organised and to have been directed by single-minded patriots of great ability who kept ever in the background, their names unknown, and took no part in the public rejoicings when the victory was won. Thus the Committees in Uskeb and Janina, by their diligent propaganda, respectively won over the allegiance of the Northern Albanians and the Southern Albanians at the same time that Niazi was gaining that of the Western Albanians. Niazi is essentially the soldier, simple and straightforward and not a politician, and, now that his mission at the time of his country’s peril has been successfully accomplished, he is back in his own province quietly fulfilling his military duties in the midst of troops who would follow him to hell, as our own private soldiers would put it. CHAPTER XIV _THE COMMITTEE’S ULTIMATUM_