The last remnants of the traditional Pan-Islamic esteem of their Arab neighbours, already sadly shattered by the Young Turks' ruthless policy towards them since 1909, were flung light-heartedly overboard by a Government that knew they were to blame for the Arab defection but thought they had found a substitute that appealed more to their true Asiatic character in these Turanistic dreams of expansion and measures of Turkification. And while fanatical adventurers and money-grubbing deputies paid by the easily duped German Embassy were preaching a perfectly useless "Holy War" on the confines of the Arabian territory of the Turkish Empire, towards the part occupied by the English, while Enver Pasha continued to visit the holy places of Islam, where he got a frosty enough reception, although the wonderfully worded communiqués on the subject succeeded in blinding the population to the true state of affairs, "the hangman's policy" of Djemal Pasha, the Commander of the Fourth Osmanic Army, and Naval Minister, had been for a long time in full swing in the old civilised land of Syria against the best families among the Mohammedan as well as the Christian population. The whole civilised world is laying up a store of accusations of this kind against the Turks, and it is to be hoped that a public sentence will be passed on these gentlemen of the "Ittihad" on the conclusion of peace by a combined court of Europeans and Americans. Here again the Young Turkish Government assumed the existence of a widespread conspiracy and a Syrian and Arabian Separatist movement towards autonomy, which was to free these lands from Turkish rule and to be established under Anglo-French protection. At the time of the Armenian persecutions the Committee had managed most cunningly to turn the whole Armenian question to their own account by publishing false official reports by the thousand, accompanied by any number of photographs of "bands of conspirators," the authenticity of which never has been proved and never will be; indeed one can only wonder where the Turkish Government got them from. In this case again there was no lack of official printed commentaries on Djemal Pasha's "hanging list," and any reader of the _Journal de Beyrouth_ in war-time would have had no difficulty in compiling it. It is certainly not my intention to question the existence of a Separatist movement towards autonomy in Syria, but it was a sporadic tendency only, and ought never to have been made the excuse for the wholesale execution of highly respected and well-born citizens who had nothing whatever to do with the matter.