In the meanwhile, people, prejudiced against all outward form of government and wholly ignorant of the elements of economics, suddenly found themselves the free electors of a representative assembly. Many people looked forward to the opening of the Parliament with grave misgivings. It is rankest heresy in these days to give utterance to such a sentiment, but one could not help thinking last autumn, when the result of the elections was still in doubt, that it might have been better to have continued the rule of the country for some time longer through a Ministry selected by the Young Turk oligarchy, and not to have conferred self-governing institutions on the people until these had been to some extent educated by the object-lessons of good government presented to them—the suppression of corruption, the efficiency of public departments, the bringing of prosperity to the wasted land, the wise expenditure on public works. But it had been decreed that the Parliament should meet as soon as possible, so the Committee of Union and Progress set itself to teach the electorate the duties of citizenship, to explain to them what constitutional government meant, and to employ its wide-reaching organisation to secure so strong a representation of its nominees in the Lower House as to give the Committee the control of affairs. The Young Turks were too wise to be over-confident. They realised the difficulties and dangers before them. They knew that the reactionaries were intriguing everywhere and would seize their chance when they got it. The Young Turks remained on their guard, determined that the liberty so hardly won should not be wrested from Turkey as it was in 1878, and that if the Turkish Parliament failed as the Russian Duma failed, it should not be to make way for the return of the Despotism.