THE YOUNG TURK 
71 
been confined in a palace on the Bos- 
porus for 33 years of his Hfe, the period 
of his predecessor's reign, and who is 
now the beloved ruler of his people. 
TROUBLES IN ALBANIA 
No country in the world ever gained 
the priceless blessing- of freedom without 
some trials. In October, 1910, the prov- 
ince of Albania, one of the western colo- 
nies of Turkey bordering on the Adriatic 
Sea, began to give trouble, and as a mat- 
ter of course it was announced by Euro- 
pean news-gatherers, who by the way 
give us all our information regarding 
Turkey, that this was due to the undying* 
hatred of the followers of Islam for all 
Christians, and that it was for the pur- 
pose of exterminating them that this con- 
flict was inaugurated by the Turk. 
It should be remembered that during 
the last years of Abdul Hamid's reign 
the Albanians were his most trusted ad- 
berents in the army. In order to main 
tain their loyalty to his person he had re- 
leased the colony from the payment of 
taxes and cajoled them into doing his 
bidding by many acts of favoritism not 
accorded to the troops recruited in other 
parts of the country. In this way he 
kept their fealty. But when the new 
order of things was established and lib- 
erty and equality became the watchwords 
■of the nation, the Albanians accepted all 
that was coming to them of the first, but 
declined to give up any of their former 
privileges in the interests of equal rights 
They demanded that only the Albanian 
language should be used in the schools 
and that the dominant race — the Turks — ■ 
who had acquired possession of the coun 
try by conquest — :the strongest claim tha 
any people can set up — should have noth 
ing to do with the internal policy of theii 
land. 
Naturally the ruling powers of the 
Empire could not agree to any such con- 
ditions, and an Albanian revolt against 
-constitutional authority followed. The 
Albanians are a hardy mountainous race 
•of men, who have kept themselves poor 
and their land barren by internecine 
"vvars ever since they, as a part of the 
Mohammedan race, conquered the coun- 
try. 
It was declared by the numerous inter- 
ested sympathizers with the revolution- 
ists in Europe that the Turks could never 
conquer Albania. But in spite of this 
widely dispersed impression, Mohammed 
Shefket Pasha, who had now become 
Minister of War in the Cabinet, went 
with a portion of the army to the scene 
of the revolt, and in less than six weeks 
the Albanians were suing for peace by 
presenting him with the usual ceremo- 
nious bowl of milk as a token of sub- 
mission. 
Like General Grant, Shefket Pasha 
was called a "butcher" for the drastic 
and energetic measures used by him in 
putting down the rebellion, and a cry of 
"foul massacre of the Christians" went 
up from all over Europe. No attention 
was paid to the fact that the majority of 
the inhabitants of Albania are of Mo- 
hammedan persuasion, and that the con- 
flict was due neither to religion nor race, 
but to politics. 
Hardly had the Albanian revolution 
been put down before another broke out 
in the Yemen, the southeastern part of 
Turkey in Asia. The Bedouin tribes in 
the Arabian desert attacked the outlying 
military stations there, v^ery much as our 
own Indian races have repeatedly done 
in the United States. This outbreak was 
of such proportions as to necessitate re- 
inforcements from all parts of the Turk- 
ish Empire, and the European military 
posts were depleted of troops in conse- 
quence. The Albanians, still smarting 
under the condign punishment inflicted 
upon them during the late uprising, at 
once took advantage of this situation to 
again take up arms, such as they could 
command — and there were many willing 
sympathizers to bring them supplies — 
but this outbreak was so short-lived as 
to hardly warrant newspaper mention. 
UNITED IN TRIPOLI 
The outcome of the Yemen insurrec- 
tion is best told in a statement made by 
Hilme Pasha, a former Grand Vizier of 
Turkey, as recently published in a letter 
from Constantinople. He says : "Tur- 
key's ex-enemy in Yemen, the Imam 
Yahra, who concluded peace and friend- 
ship with the Sultan, is declared to have 
