The reform throws a vivid light, too, on the inner relationship of the jingoistic, pure Pan-Turkish leaders of present-day Turkey towards religion. And it is perhaps not generally known that at all the deliberations of the "Committee" where the will of Talaat, the uncrowned king of Turkey, is alone decisive, the opinion of the Grand Master of the Turkish Freemasons is always listened to, and that he is one of the most willing tools of the "Ittihad." No, the members of the "Committee for Union and Progress" have for a very long time simply snapped their fingers at Islam if it hindered them making use of and profiting from their own subjects. They know very well how to retain at least the outward semblance of friendliness so long as Islam does not directly cross the path of Pan-Turkism. But the Armenian atrocities, instigated by Talaat, have as little to do with religion, they are as exclusively the result of pure race-fanaticism, professional jealousy, and greed, as the hostile, devil-may-care attitude towards Greece, and the millions of well-to-do Ottoman Greeks who are the next troublesome competitors and suitable victims of aggrandisement to be disposed of after the Armenians, or as the terrible persecutions against the highest class of Syrians and Arabs pictured in Djemal Pasha's famous paper. They are Turks, pure Turks with the most narrow-minded jingoistic point of view, and not broad-minded Mohammedans, that sit on the Committee in "Nur-el-Osmanieh" in Stamboul and make all these wonderful political plans, from internal reforms and measures of government which attempt to adapt themselves to European technique by sacrificing ancient traditions, to the hangman's tactics employed against their own subjects. Take the case of the Syrians and the Arabs. The "Ittihad" clique, weltering in a fog of Pan-Turkish illusion, were yet not without anxiety with regard to the intellectual and social superiority, to say nothing of the political sharpness, of these peoples compared with the Turks. They had yielded entirely to their brutal instincts of extermination and suppression towards foreign races, and the Germans had made no attempt to curb them. They were political parvenus suddenly freed from the control of the civilised Great Powers, and they did not know how to make use of that freedom. Perhaps they felt themselves already on the edge of an abyss and were constrained to snatch what they could while there was yet time. Is it any wonder, then, that the Turks should throw over all trace of decency towards the Syrians and the Arabs once they were sure that these peoples, who regarded their oppressors with most justifiable hatred, would refuse to have anything to do with the "Holy War" of the Turanian Pseudo-Caliph?