The greater part of this book was in the press, and the preceding chapter, which was to have been the final one, lacked but a few concluding paragraphs to bring my work to a close, when the news reached London that a revolution had broken out in Constantinople. On that eventful thirteenth of April I was lunching in a literary club off the Strand with two well-known members of the Young Turk party. The information conveyed by an early issue of a so-called evening paper was scanty, and we hoped that nothing worse had occurred than one of those mutinous demonstrations on the part of the Sultan’s pampered Body-guard which the Young Turks have already proved themselves capable of suppressing with promptitude and vigour. But later and fuller information brought anger and sorrow to the friends of Turkey: nearly the whole garrison of the capital had risen against the Government; the soldiers were killing their young officers; fanatical mobs were hunting out the members of the Young Turk party to murder them; the Committee of Union and Progress, in Constantinople at any rate, was at the feet of its enemies. The members of the Committee were fleeing for their lives from their fellow-countrymen, whom they had saved from a hated despotism. A few months ago I heard these same Constantinople mobs shouting themselves hoarse with cries of “Long live the Committee of Union and Progress!” and all seemed grateful to this band of men who, animated by single-minded patriotism and a spirit of self-sacrifice, had organised the revolution. But a large portion of the population of Constantinople is a very vile thing; it is made up of everything that is worst of the various races of the Levant and of regions farther east. The fanatical Kurds are ever ready to join in any rising that gives them the opportunity of pillage and murder; the greater part of the Christian population is too cowardly to defend itself; here, too, are collected all the ex-spies and other corrupt products of the old _régime_. One is inclined to think that one of the chief lessons to be learnt by the Young Turks from the counter-revolution is that the seat of Government might with advantage be removed from Constantinople to some place at a considerable distance from it. My Turkish friends, I may state here, were perfectly confident, through those mid-April days when Turkey’s future seemed so dark, that the triumph of the reactionaries would be but short-lived, that right would prevail, and that within a few days the provinces, strongly supporting the Young Turk cause, would compel the capital to submit to their will.