May g, igi8 
Land & Water 
Enver Pasha, Minister of War 
A man of the people, who, at 26, was a leader in the 
revolution which Jeposed Abdul Hamid and estab- 
li«hed the new tigime of the Young Turks. At that 
time the Young Turks honestly desired to establish a 
Turkish democracy. This attempt failed miserably 
and the Young Turk leaders then ruled the Turkish 
Empire for their own selfish purposes. Enver is 
chiefly responsible for turning the Turkish army over 
to Germany. He imagines himself a combination 
of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. 
Talaat Pasha, Grand Vizier 
In 1914, when the war broke out, Talaat was 
Minister of the Interior and the most influential 
leader in the Committee of Union and Progress, the 
secret organisation which controlled the Turkish 
Empire. A few years ago Talaat was a letter-carrier, 
and afterward a telegraph operator in Adrianople. 
His talents are those of a great political boss. He 
recently represented Turkey in the peace negotiations 
with Russia and his signature appears on the Brest- 
Litovsk treaty. 
Djemal Pasha, Minister of Marine 
In 1 914 Djemal headed the Police Department; it 
was his duty to run down citizens who were opposing 
the political gang then controlling Turkey. Such 
opponents were commonly assassinated or judicially 
murdered. Afterward Djemal was NJinister of 
Marine, and as such violently protested' against the 
sale of American warships to Greece. Then he wat 
sent to Palestine as Commander of the Fourth Army 
Corps, where he distinguished himself as leader in the 
wholesale massacre of the non-Moslem population. 
massacre and disorder in the Turkish Empire had apparently 
ended. The great assassin, Abdul Hamid, had been removed 
to soUtary confinement at Salonika ; and his brother, the 
gentle Mohammed V., had ascended the throne as the first 
constitutional sovereign of Turkey. Such had been the 
promise ; by the time I reached Constantinople, in 1913, 
however, many changes had taken place. Austria had 
annexed two Turkish provinces, Bosnia and Herzegovina ; 
citizens are busily engaged in the daily tasks and have no 
leisure for pubUc matters. In Turkey the masses were 
altogether too ignorant to understand the meaning of demo- 
cracy ; the bankruptcy and general vicissitudes of the 
country had left it with practically no government and an 
easy prey to a desperate band of adventurers. The Com- 
mittee of Union and Progress, with Talaat Bey as the Supreme 
Boss constituted such a band. About forty men controlled 
Italy had wrenched away Tripoii ; Turkey had fought two this committee, and there were sub-committees stationed in 
th the Balkan St'atcs, and had lost all her territories all important cities of the empire. These men met frequently 
in secret ; they formulated their plans, allocated the patron- 
age, and' issued orders to their nominees, who filled nearly 
all the important offices. These men, hke orthodox depart- 
ment heads in the worst days— now, happily, passed— of 
American city government, "took orders" and made the 
appointments submitted to them. 
I must admit, however, that I do the corrupt American 
gangs a certain injustice in comparing them with the Turkish 
Committee of Union and Progress. Talaat, Enver, and 
Djemal had added to their system a detail that has not 
figured extensively in American poHtics — that of assassina- 
tion and judicial murder. They had wrested power from 
the other factions by a deed of violence. This coup d'etat 
wars wit 
in Europe, except Constantinople and a small hinterland. 
The aims for the regeneration of Turkey that had inspired 
the revolution had evidently miscarried. I soon discovered 
that four years of so-called democratic rule had ended with 
the nation more degraded, more impoverished, and more 
dismembered than ever before. Indeed, long before I had 
arrived this attempt to estabhsh a Turkish democracy had 
failed. Let us not criticise too harshly the Young Turks ; 
there is no question that, at the beginning, they were sincere. 
In a speech in Liberty Square, Salonika, in July, 1908, Enver 
Pasha had eloquently declared that: "To-day arbitrary 
government has disappeared. We are all brothers. There 
are no longer Turks, Bulgarians, Greeks, Servians, Ruman- — ^ ^.i u t 
ians, Mussuhnans, Jews. Under the same blue sky we are had taken place on January 26th. 1913. a few months betore 
aU proud to be Ottomans." That represented the Young my arrival. At that time a political group headed by the 
Turk ideal for the new Turkish State, but it was an ideal venerable Kiamil Pasha, as Grand Vizier, and Mazim Fasha, 
which had been maltreated and massacred for centuries by as minister of war, controlled the government ; they repre- 
the Turks; they could not transform themselves over-night ,sented a faction known as the Liberal Partv, winch was 
into brothers ; 'hatreds, jealousies, and religious prejudices chiefly distinguished for its enmity to the Young lurks, 
of the past still divided Turkey into a medley of warring These men had fought the disastrous Balkan War ; ;nd, in 
clans. Above all, the destructive wars and the loss of great 
sections of the Turkish Empire had destroyed the prestige of 
the new democracy. There were other reasons for the 
failure ; but it is not necessary to go into them at this time. 
Committee of Union and Progress 
Though the Young Turks had disappeared as a positive, 
regenerating force, they still existed as a pohtical machine. 
Their leaders, Talaat, Enver, and Djemal, had long since 
abandoned any expectation of reforming their state, but 
they had developed an insatiable lust for personal power. 
The pohtical order that existed in Turkey in 1913 bore 
certain resemblances to the Boss system in the United States. 
The Committee of Union and Progress was a private, irre- 
sponsible group of men who secretly manipulated elections, 
and filled the offices with their own henchmen. It had its 
own building in Constantinople, with a supreme chief who 
gave all his time to its affairs and issued orders to his sub- 
ordinates ; in fact, he ruled the party precisely like an 
American city boss in the most unrcgenerate days. It 
furnished a splendid illustration of "invisible government." 
This kind of irresponsible government has obtained control 
of American cities mainly because the real hard-working 
January, they had felt themselves compelled to accept the 
advice of the European Powers and surrender Adrianople to 
Bulgaria. The Young Turks had been outside the breast- 
works for about six months, looking for an opportunity to 
return to power. The proposed surrender of Adrianople 
apparently furnished them this opportunity. Adrianople was 
an important Turkish city, and naturally the Turkish people 
regarded the contemplated surrender as marking still another 
milestone to their national doom. Talaat and Enver hastily 
collected about 200 followers- and marched up to the Sublime 
Porte, where the ministry was then sitting. Nazim, hearing 
the uproar, stepped out into the hall. He courageously 
faced the crowd, a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands 
thrust into his pockets. 
"Come, boys," he said, good humouredly. "what's all this 
noise about ? Don't you know that it is inteifering with 
our deliberations ? " 
The words had hardly left his mouth when he fell dead. 
A bullet had pierced a vital spot. 
The mob, led by Talaat and Enver, then forced their way 
into the council-room. They forced Kiamil, the Grand 
Vizier— he was more than eighty years old— to resign his 
post under threat of meeting Nazim's fate. 
(To be continued). 
