There were good reasons for choosing this portion of Turkey as their strategic base. In the first place, it was here that the forces were chiefly at work which were threatening the speedy dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the Young Turks realised that unless they quickly came to the rescue it would be too late, and Macedonia would be lost. The terrible condition of the country, overrun as it was by murderous bands of political brigands supported by Turkey’s enemies, had already drawn an interference in the internal affairs of Macedonia on the part of the Great Powers that was deeply humiliating to every patriotic Turk. The Powers had compelled the Sultan, by threat of force, to consent to the supervision of the civil administration of Macedonia by an international financial commission, and to the formation of an international _gendarmerie_ trained and commanded by foreign officers—of whom, by the way, the English officers have undoubtedly been the most successful, as they are more in sympathy than the others with the nature of the Turkish soldier. But the patriotic Turks, though they often entertained personal affection for the European officers who were thus thrust upon them, loathed this foreign interference, and nourished a bitter resentment against the Hamidian _régime_, whose inept rule had brought this indignity upon Turkey and made the world regard the Ottomans as a fallen people no longer capable of managing their own affairs. There was one feature of this foreign intervention which was especially disagreeable and alarming to the Young Turks. The reforms proposed by England, a disinterested country, had been rejected by the Powers, and a mandate had been given to Russia and Austria—regarded by the Turks as their most treacherous enemies—to introduce their own programme of reform (the Murzteg programme) into Macedonia. The Turks maintained, as, too, did independent observers, that these two Powers of a purpose made this programme a wholly ineffective one, and that their representatives were so working as to foment disorder and strife among the Christian populations in order to forward the schemes for the dismemberment of European Turkey. The signs of this foreign intervention everywhere around them served as object lessons to the people in Macedonia, whether educated men or peasants, civilians or soldiers, and they realised that, unless the methods of Turkish government improved, the foreign hold on the country would be ever tightened until its independence was destroyed. Thus there spread throughout Macedonia a profound discontent with the existing order of things, that prepared the ground for the great conspiracy.