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Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor: these were the chief of Talaat Bey's agricultural colonies. There must be collecting stations for these tragic colonists, centres to which they must be herded in from surrounding districts: one at Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at Ras-el-Ain, one at Damascus.
He suppressed the message, warned the revolutionary committee, and persuaded them to start their work at once. The coup succeeded, the Sultan was deposed, and Talaat was made Minister of the Interior. With iron energy he then turned his attention to the suppression of the opposing movement. Later, he became Grand Vizier, and impersonated, together with Enver Pasha, the will and power of Turkey.
Sooner than risk her hold over Turkey by enforcing unacceptable demands, she will, unless other considerations of self-interest determine her, let further massacres occur, if Talaat Bey insists on them.
More significant perhaps than any is a transaction that took place in May 1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha took the whole of their private fortunes out of the Deutsche Bank in Constantinople, and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely, the Banque Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Fédérale: they drew out also the whole funds of the Committee of Union and Progress, and similarly transferred them.
Talaat refused to allow the speech to be read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the massacres on to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans.
That was the way to treat subject people: 'the first care of a state is to protect itself, as Enver and Talaat could read in the text-books now translated into Turkish, in copies, maybe, presented to them by their Master in Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof of her enlightenment and regeneration, by following in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur.
Such were some of the straws which finally broke the back of sober resistance to the warlike gamble of Enver and Talaat; but the substantial argument was the chance which was offered for Turkey to get back some of what her inveterate Russian enemy had seized in the course of a century and her inveterate British friend had pocketed as the price of her protection.
Their withdrawal, of course, was hailed with a peacock scream of pride by that enlightened body under Talaat and Enver, called the New Turkish party of Progress, for their presence was a bar to the Turkish notions of civilisation, in that their influence made for humanity, and health and education.
But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to, or rather towards those 'agricultural colonies, as Talaat Bey, in a flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them.
The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of Islam.... That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in Alice in Wonderland: 'After such kindness that would be A dismal thing to do.
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