In the Young Turkish memorandum on this act of spying and bloodshed, the passages most underlined and printed in the boldest characters, the passages which, according to official intention, were to justify these frightful reprisals, form the most terrible indictment ever brought against Turkish despotism, and provide the most complete proof of the truth of all the accusations made against the Turkish Government by the ill-treated and oppressed Syrians and Arabians. On anyone who does not read with Young Turkish eyes the memorandum makes directly the opposite impression to what was intended. And even if the Separatist movement had existed in any greater extent--which was quite out of the question owing to lack of weapons, conflicting interests, the contrasts in the people themselves, some of them Mohammedan, some Christian, some sectarian, and the impossibility of any kind of organisation under the stern discipline of Turkish rule--the Turks would have most richly deserved it and it would have been justified by the thousands of brutalities inflicted by the Old and Young Turkish régimes on the highly civilised Arabian people and their industrious and commercial neighbours the Syrians, who had always been much influenced by European culture. Anyone who has once watched how the Committee in Stamboul made a pretext of events on the borders of Caucasia to exterminate a whole people, including women and children, even in Western and Central Anatolia and the Capital, can no longer be in the least doubt as to the methods employed by Djemal Pasha, the "hangman" of Syrians and Arabs, how grossly he must have exaggerated and misstated the facts to find enough victims so that he could look on for a year and a half with a cigar in his mouth--as he himself boasted--while the flower of Syrian and Arabian youth, the élite of society, and the aged heads of the best families in the land were either hanged or shot.