This page needs to be proofread.

been exiled from the College of Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.

The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the interior by Konia whose historic dervish tekkes were a well of Islam undefiled. It was the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who girded each new Caliph with the Prophet's sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.

But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans were al-