The time had indeed arrived for patriotic Turks to bestir themselves and come to the rescue of their country; for it was about this date that the most critical period of her history opened, and that various happenings in her European and Asiatic provinces threatened the disruption of the Empire. In 1890 the persecuted Armenians commenced the agitation which later on the Sultan put down with wholesale massacres. In the early nineties, too, the Bulgarians in Macedonia initiated the conspiracy which, after various small risings, culminated in the rebellion of 1903; and here, as in Armenia, the Turkish irregulars suppressed insurrection with slaughter and rapine. Indignation was aroused in Europe, especially in England, and in 1903 the British Government urged the other Powers to join her in compelling the Porte to accept a scheme of reform under European supervision that should secure fair government and the security of Turkey’s Christian subjects. But the jealousy of the Powers stood in the way of any genuine co-operation, while the policy of Turkey’s two most powerful neighbours was to destroy the Ottoman Empire and not to reform it; so the British scheme was rejected; the measures that were taken by the Powers proved wholly inadequate; the anarchy in Macedonia ever grew worse; and it became evident that sooner or later foreign intervention of an effective and forcible character would be necessitated. Now the one essential part of the Young Turk programme is the preservation of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Opportunists in the rest of their policy, the Young Turks are determined that no more Ottoman territory shall be placed under foreign domination. They feel that foreign interference in Turkey’s internal affairs means loss of national independence and the ultimate expulsion of the Turks from the European side of the Bosphorus. They entertain the strongest objection to the attempted settlement of the racial disputes in Macedonia by foreign Powers, and the chief article of their faith is that, for Turkey to hold her own in the world, her reforms must come from _within_ and not from _without_. Therefore at this juncture, knowing that they had the educated classes in Turkey in sympathy with them, and that oppression had made the masses discontented, these Turkish patriots in Geneva decided to create an organisation whose object it would be to bring pressure to bear upon the Turkish Government, and move the Sultan to sanction the much needed reforms. At this early stage they did not feel sufficiently strong to plan the deposition of the monarch should he prove obdurate, but they resolved so to arrange matters in Constantinople as to make it impossible, in the case of the death of that clever and masterly monarch, for his successor to rule on the same despotic lines.