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 friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia's only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidian regime. An Armenian bloc was formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the technique of revolution. The committees' reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana "massacre." This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid's savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presuma