less than a million and a quarter inhabitants. Sixty years later these had swelled to nearly four millions. In spite of the presence of a large Armenian population in the north, the Armenian troubles of the reign in the rest of the Empire awoke but a faint echo in Syria. No urban massacre took place there, even when such neighbouring centres as Urfa, Birejik, and Adana were convulsed; and a few isolated atrocities committed in convents and villages, like that at Yenije Kale in 1896, were so generally condemned by the public opinion of Aleppo, Alexandretta, Aintab, and other towns that their contagion never spread: Even Zeitun, provocative though it was, escaped any very severe treatment. Thanks to the influence of Syrians like Izzet Pasha elAbid, in Abdul Hamid's secret councils, the province got something more than its share of Government help and opportunity of advancement, with the result that it was by no means ripe for revolt in 1908, and that Abdul Hamid's name is not held accursed there at this day. It would not have required more than some consideration, some breadth of sympathy, some relaxation of doctrinaire patriotism, to secure the co-operation of Young Arabs with Young Turks and the continued solidarity of Syria with the Ottoman Empire.
Young Turk Revolution and Arabs.—Such consideration, however, the Arab-speaking peoples were not to find at the hands of the Ottomanising doctrinaires of the Committee of Union and Progress. Like other provincials, the Arabs had been carried off their feet by the high-sounding phrases which rang out at the first from Salonika and Constantinople. Syria found these words easy to act upon, since she had no such notoriously subversive elements in her population as existed, for example, in European Turkey and in some parts of Asia Minor; and, even in Damascus, there was not much bitterness between races or creeds. But with ideas of nationality, home rule, and representative institutions in the air, no wonder the Arabs thought of managing
