To win over the Army to their side was of course the first object of the Young Turks, and therefore Macedonia was well chosen as the field of the early operations, inasmuch as the troops there were in a more disaffected condition than those in any other part of the Empire, and were ripe for revolt. For years these troops—ill clad, ill fed, and rarely paid—had been engaged in a desultory guerilla war against the bands of the Christian insurgents—a form of police work that brought no glory and was uncongenial to soldiers, while, by scattering them over the country in small sections, it did away with the cohesion and _esprit de corps_ essential to an army. Their discontent was also aroused by seeing by the side of them their brothers of the smart international _gendarmerie_, men with military pride and bearing, well disciplined and (for the Powers saw to this) well clothed and fed, and regularly paid. It hurt the self-respect of both officers and men in the regular army to contrast the condition of these men with that of their ragged selves, for which, as they well knew, the corrupt administration of the Palace gang was to blame. Of the intolerable military spy system and the other causes of disaffection among the officers of the Ottoman forces I have already spoken. The young officers of the Macedonia army, men of education and open-minded, who had passed through the military academies and had received instruction from foreign teachers, had exceptional opportunities in Macedonia for observing how an infamous rule was hurrying their country to its ruin, and therefore their sympathies naturally inclined towards the Young Turkey movement. Moreover, special grievances of their own aggravated their detestation of the Hamidian _régime_; the spy system was more searching and oppressive then elsewhere in this suspected portion of the Ottoman army, and it had become the habit of the Palace—galling to those who suffered under it—to send from the capital sleek Court favourites, with nothing of the soldier in them, to assume commands over the heads of fine officers who had taken a distinguished part in Turkey’s wars, and had been fighting the insurgent bands for years in the Macedonian mountains, but had never obtained the promotion that was their due. Moreover, it favoured the plan of the revolutionaries that this vantage ground of Macedonia was at a safe distance from the capital—from the Palace with its myriad eyes and its regiments of well-fed, well-equipped, well-paid troops who could be counted upon to remain loyal to the despotism. So far as the Mussulman population and the army were concerned, Macedonia was therefore ripe for rebellion, and the Christian peasantry, weary of the slaughter and devastation which the bands for years had been inflicting on the wretched country, were ready to welcome any new order of things that promised to bring peace and security.