a special animosity; they were powerful and warlike, and Enver, Talaat, and others saw that the idea of an Osmanli supremacy could never be realised unless very drastic measures were taken against them.  The tenets of Islamism, it is true, forbade Moslems to fight Moslems, but Islamism, as a binding force, was already obsolete in the counsels of the new regime, having given place to Kultur.  Of all their subject peoples, the Young Turks hated the Arabs the most, and, had not the European War intervened, there is no doubt that the Armenian massacres, already being planned, would have been followed by Arab massacres.  But the armed and warlike Arabian tribes were not so easy to deal with as the defenceless Armenians, and Turkish troops could not be spared in sufficient numbers to render an Arab massacre the safe, pleasant, and lucrative pursuit that massacres should be.  But Jemal the Great, black with his triumph over the Armenians at Zeitun, was Military Governor of Syria, and, the Armenian question being solved, he began to get to work on the Arab question.  Owing to the expulsion of the French Missions from Syria in 1914, we have no such full or detailed information as we have from Americans in Armenia, and the following account is mainly derived from the Arabic journal Mokattam, published in Cairo, the information in which is based on the account given by a Syrian refugee.  It agrees with pieces of evidence that have come to hand from other sources.

Ever since the beginning of the war Syria has been an area of direst poverty, starvation, and sickness, which have been the natural co-operators in Jemal’s policy there.  All supplies have been commandeered for the troops (including by special clause from Potsdam, the German troops); even fish caught by the fishermen of Lebanon have to be handed over to the military authorities, and the shortage of supplies in Smyrna, for instance, is such that at the end of 1916 there were two hundred deaths daily from sheer starvation, while Germany was importing from Turkey hundreds of tons of corn and of meat.  Thus this was no natural shortage, for though supplies were low all over the Turkish Empire, there was not dearth of that kind.  It was an artificial shortage made possible by German demands, and made intentional by Jemal’s policy.  Beirut was in no better case than Smyrna; Lebanon perhaps was in sorer straits than either.  Money was equally scarce, and it fitted Jemal’s policy that this should be so, for when Americans in Beirut had raised funds in America for the relief of the destitute, the Turkish Government forbade their distribution.  Arabs and Greeks were dying by the hundred all over the provinces, and the beneficent decrees of nature must not be interfered with.  In the streets of towns the poor have been fighting over scraps of sugarcane and orange peel; in the country, to quote from Molcattam, ’no sooner do wild plants and beans start to grow than the fields are filled with women and children who pick them and use them as food.’  Except for military purposes (including the victualling of German troops) transportation has ceased to exist, and this, too, was part of the policy of Jemal the Great.