Power began faintly to wonder whether the Young Turks in their deposition of Abdul Hamid had not slain an asp and hatched a cockatrice.  Given that their aims originally were sincere, we can but marvel at the swiftness of the corruption which in little more than a year had begun to lead them not into paths of reform and Liberal policy, but along the road towards which the butcher they had deposed had pointed the way.  It must have made Abdul Hamid gnaw his nails and shake impotent hands to see those who had torn him from his throne so soon pursuing the very policy which he invented, and to which he nominally owed his dethronement.  Strange, too, was it that his overthrow should come from the very quarter to which he looked for security, for it was on the army that each Sultan in turn had most relied for the stability of his throne.  But Abdul Hamid, in order, perhaps, to deal more effectually with the subject races he wished to exterminate, had introduced a system of foreign training for the officers of his army, a course of Potsdam efficiency, and it was just they, on whom Sultans from time immemorial had relied, who knocked the prop of the army away from him.  Though publicly, for the edification of Europe his deposers professed a Liberal policy, it was not on account of Armenian massacres that they turned him off his throne, but because of the muddle and corruption and debility of his rule.  Herein we may easily trace the hand of Germany, no longer publicly beckoning as when Wilhelm II., just after the first Armenian massacres, made his request of the Sultan for the establishment in Turkey of German colonists, but working underground, sapping and mining like a mole.  For Germany, her mind already fixed on securing Turkey as an instrument of her Eastern policy, wanted a strong Turkey, and without doubt desired to bring an end to the disorganisation and decay of the Empire, and create and at the same time interpenetrate an efficient state that should be useful to her.  We may take it for granted that she, like the rest of Europe, welcomed any sign of regeneration in the Ottoman Empire, but there was an ulterior purpose behind that.  Turkey, already grasped by the Prussian hand, must be in that hand a weapon fit for use, a blade on which she could rely.  She strengthened the Turkish army by the introduction of Prussian discipline, and worked on good material.  Already she has realised her ambition in this respect, and now controls the material which she then worked on.

The troubled years of the Balkan wars which followed this false dawn, coupled with the loss of all the territory which remained to the Ottoman Empire in Europe, with the exception of Thrace, caused an immediate reaction from the open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we decide to credit them at the outset with a sincere purpose.  Organisation by a slightly different spelling became Ottomanisation, and the aims of the Young Turks were identified with those of the Nationalist