.

"The Arab lands," writes Djelal Noury Bey in a recently-published work,
"and above all Irak[12] and Yemen, must become Turkish colonies in which
we shall spread our own language, so that at the right moment we may
make it the language of religion. It is a peculiarly imperious necessity
of our existence for us to Turkise the Arab lands, for the
particularistic idea of nationality is awaking among the younger
generation of Arabs, and already threatens us with a great catastrophe.
Against this we must be forearmed."

And Ahmed Sherif Bey, again, has written as follows in the _Tanin_:

"The Arabs speak their own language and are as ignorant of Turkish as if
their country were not a dependency of Turkey. It is the business of the
_Porte_ to make them forget their own language and to impose upon them
instead that of the nation which rules them. If the Porte loses sight of
this duty it will be digging its grave with its own hands, for if the
Arabs do not forget their language, their history, and their customs,
they will seek to restore their ancient empire on the ruins of
Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia."

A Turkish pamphleteer wrote that "the Arabs have been a misfortune to
Turkey," and that "a Turkish conqueror's war-horse is better than the
Prophet of any other nation." This pamphlet was distributed in the
Caucasus at the Ottoman Government's expense as Turkish propaganda.

But the best proof of the Young Turks' intentions towards the Arabs is
their actual conduct in the Arab provinces of their Empire. In the
spring of 1916 an Arab who had escaped from Syria published some facts
in the Egyptian Press which the Turkish censorship had previously
managed to conceal[13]. Business was ruined, because the Turks had
confiscated all gold and forced the people to accept depreciated paper;
the population was starving, and the Turks had prohibited the American
colony at Beirut from organising relief; the national susceptibilities
of the inhabitants were outraged in petty ways--the railway tickets, for
instance, were no longer printed in Arabic, but only in Turkish and
German; and spies were active in denouncing the least manifestations of
disaffection. A Turkish court-martial was sitting in the Lebanon, and at
the time our informant left Syria it had 240 persons under arrest, 180
of them on political charges. These prisoners were the leading men of
Syria--Christians and Moslems without distinction; for in Syria, as in
A