The awakening of Turkey, the growth of liberalism, and the thirst for knowledge among the educated Turks, including even the _Ulemas_, whom the world regarded as the most narrow-minded of Mussulman conservatives, were largely encouraged by the very measures which Abdul Hamid had taken to suppress these ideas and movements so dangerous to his despotism. Men of ability, being suspected by the Palace, and living in perpetual dread of the _espionage_ which enveloped them like some hideous nightmare, were unable to associate with each other freely, and had to live isolated lives, the tedium of which they relieved by reading, with a greater avidity than is displayed in other countries, where men have wider scope for their intellectual energies, works on history, philosophy, and law, and other literature which were smuggled into Turkey across her land and sea frontiers. In latter days the Turkish exiles in Europe succeeded in pouring prohibited literature wholesale into Turkey, but at first the supply was small; one book, passed secretly from one man to another, would be read by hundreds, and young men greedy for instruction even went to the pains of copying out with their own hands bulky volumes which they had borrowed. Many a man who considers himself to be well read would feel ashamed on discovering how much wider than his own is the knowledge of English literature possessed by some of his friends among the Young Turks. The Sultan, too, unintentionally, spread far and wide the very influences which it was his desire to destroy, for by driving thousands of educated men out of Constantinople into exile in various provinces of his Empire, he made of these, missionaries of enlightenment, liberalism, and political discontent. Those also who were exiled to foreign countries and lived in Paris and other Western capitals came under the immediate influence of modern ideas, and, communicating with their friends in Turkey, inoculated them with their own views. Thus it came about that the whole Empire was gradually leavened with dissatisfaction with the Sultan’s rule, and the ground was prepared for the revolution. CHAPTER VI _THE RISE OF THE YOUNG TURKS_