y of our existence,' we
read in Jelal Noury Bey's propaganda, 'to Turkise the Arab lands, for
the particularistic idea of nationality is awaking among the younger
generations of Arabs, and already threatens us with a great
catastrophe.' Against the Arabs the Young Turks formed and fostered 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, t