The Committee justified its treatment of Kiamil Pasha and its other arbitrary acts by pleading the necessity of protecting the nation against the strong reactionary forces which certainly do exist, despite the assertions of the organs of the Liberal Union, which have ever ridiculed the possibility of a reactionary movement, and have accused the Committee of having invented this bogey as an excuse for its own despotic methods. Kiamil Pasha had ever been the friend of the English, and his removal from the Grand Vizierate produced—to the great regret of the Young Turks—a somewhat bad impression in England, the country above all others whose friendship is valued by patriotic Turks. Those who had held that the Committee was an illegal institution and ought to be dissolved became alienated for a while from the men who had been the saviours of Turkey; and it is a great pity that this was so, for at that critical time the Young Turks, who never before had trod the tortuous ways of politics, and were apt to fall into the traps that were cunningly laid for them, were much in need of the sympathetic help and advice from those whose experience and knowledge qualified them to offer these. The result is, I think, that the Young Turk side of the question has not been understood in England. The Young Turk party, as represented by the Committee of Union and Progress, is now but one of several parties in Turkey professing Liberal principles. In Parliament the Committee’s nominees form the large majority; but the rival parties, though they may be numerically small and were regarded as insignificant when I was in the country, have displayed great energy in winning supporters outside the Chamber, and are no longer a negligible quantity. Though diametrically opposed to each other in their principles, they appear to be united in their hatred and jealousy of the Young Turk party, without whose self-sacrificing struggle for freedom they would never have had an opportunity of existing at all. The Young Turks, as I have explained, desired Ottoman unity, perhaps an impossible but certainly a noble ideal, and it was a disappointment to them that, so soon as Parliament met, the Deputies who were not partisans of the Committee divided themselves into distinct nationalist groups, some of them impracticably socialistic in their aims, others separatist at heart.