But his high intellectual abilities do not prevent him from suffering from that same plague of narrow-minded, jingoistic illusion peculiar to the Pan-Turks. He is as if intoxicated with a race-fanaticism that stifles all nobler emotions. Talaat is too methodical and clever not to avoid all intentional ruthlessness, but in practice his system, which he follows out with inflexible logic to the bitter end, turns out to be just as brutal as Enver's intrinsically more brutal policy. And although he accommodates himself outwardly to modern European methods and knows how to utilise them, the ethics of his system are out-and-out Asiatic. When Talaat speaks in the "Committee," there is very rarely the slightest opposition. He has usually prepared and coached the "Committee" so well beforehand that he can to all appearance keep in the background and only follow the majority. With the exception of a few military affairs, everything has always taken place that he has proposed in Parliament. Beside this man, whose sparkling eyes, massive shoulders, broad chest, clean-cut profile and exuberant health denote the whole unbounded energy of the dictator, the good-natured, degenerate, and epileptically inclined Sultan, Mehmed V, "El Ghazi" ("the hero"), is but a weak shadow. But if we fully recognise Talaat's high intellectual qualities, we should like all the more to emphasise that he must be held personally responsible more than all the others for everything that is now happening in Turkey, so far as it is not of a military character. The spirit reigning in Turkey to-day, the spirit of Pan-Turkish jingoism, is Talaat's spirit. The Armenian persecutions are his very own work. And when the day of reckoning comes for the Turkey of the "Committee of Union and Progress," it is to be hoped that Europe as judge and chastiser and avenger of an outraged civilisation, will lay the chief blame on Talaat Pasha rather than on his far weaker colleague Enver. All his eminent qualities, however, do not prevent this intellectual leader of Turkey, the most important man, beside the Sultan, in the land, from showing signs of something that is typical of the whole "Committee" clique with their dictatorial power, and which we may perhaps be allowed to call _parvenuishness_. At all points we see the characteristics of the parvenu in this statesman and one-time adventurer and in these creatures of the "Committee" who have recently become wealthy by certain abuses--I would remind you only of the Requisitions--and by a lucrative adherence to the ruling clique. There are of course individual cases of distinguished men of good birth throwing in their lot with the "Committee," but they are extremely rare, and they only help to give an even worse impression of the average Young Turk belonging to the Government. Their past is usually extremely doubtful, and their careers have been somewhat varied.