In Salonica, with its teeming population of Turks, Greeks, Jews, Albanians, Bulgarians, and Levantines of many mixed races, speaking divers tongues, it is easy for men to assume disguises and difficult for spies to trace conspiracies. In no city does one come across a greater variety of race and picturesque costume than in these busy bazaars and streets—the Jews (who here number fifty thousand) who look as if they had stepped straight out of the Venice of Shakespeare’s time, the men in gabardines, the women in robes such as were worn by the ancestors of these people when they were driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, still speaking among themselves a strange Spanish dialect—swaggering Albanians in their picturesque becoming national costume of which Byron sang—burly Bulgarian peasants—priests of all denominations, including Russian monks of neighbouring Mount Athos, emissaries from that holy promontory on which for one thousand years no woman or even animal of the female sex has been allowed to set foot, where monks in their thousands dwell in ascetic retirement in monasteries perched like the lamaseries of Tibet among the mountains, while in the wildest and most inaccessible spots anchorites have their hermitages and live in complete solitude after the manner of their predecessor, St. Anthony. The fact that it was possible in this crowded city to escape observation and to organise secret societies made Salonica the natural centre of the Young Turk movement in Macedonia. Secret political organisation already existed there, and the Internal Organisations of the Bulgarian revolutionary party had had its head-quarters there since about 1895. CHAPTER VIII _THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE_ Thus, in the summer of 1906, the Young Turk movement crystallised into a secret society in Salonica, so well organised that it effected its purpose despite the universal _espionage_, its work, of course, being facilitated by the fact that in every part of the Empire the system of administration had become so hateful to the people that, outside the horde of spies, and those who prospered under the methods of the old _régime_, few men could be found so base as to betray the leaders to the authorities. It will make a wonderful story, when it is fully told, that of these men working in secret and danger, many losing their lives and still more their fortunes, but spreading their propaganda, becoming ever stronger, until at last, having secured the support of a great army and a powerful Church, they won liberty for Turkey by the almost bloodless revolution that has taken all Europe by surprise.