described, there has come into being a group not large but powerful and very visible who have had a European education. To the training and literature of the East they add the scientific, military, diplomatic, or general education of the West. I have sometimes felt that these were the best educated men I have ever met. They were not only bi-lingual and tri-lingual, as much at home in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish letters as in European literatures, but they were bi-cosmic. They habitually lived in two worlds, the East and the West. It is often said of them that they have lost the morals of the one and have not gained the morals of the other. This is not always true. Some such are as good as any I have known, men to be trusted in all the relations of life.

This class as a whole is very conspicuous. Its members hold high posts. They are often good administrators or diplomatists, sometimes military commanders of merit. They have never gained the confidence of the great Moslem mass, Turkish, or of other races. They have drawn codes, created universities and professional schools, given the army highly trained officers; but they nearly always lack character. In their acute intellects they remind one of the men of the Italian renaissance as well as in the morals of most of them. Like Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen

turies they can do everything in statecraft but lay the foundations of a secure state.

In modern days much else of change has appeared. The public debt has certain revenues allocated to it. These are collected and payments made by the debt service which is responsible to the bondholders committee. The debt in 1913 was $644,000,000; now no one knows its size. Many utilities, railroads, trolleys, telephones, port facilities in wharves and lighterage are under the control of foreign concessionaries. These raise many difficult problems and lead to officious, disturbing, and, in some cases, corrupt, foreign interference. The necessity of disposing of these is taken up by General Harbord in his report on a mandate; but as these would all profit by stability and order, they would offer few difficulties in adjustment.

The past two years have consolidated the Ottomans. The fight they have made has given new confidence. Differences have gone. All Moslems look to them. Delay in Europe, refusal in the United States, have encouraged a belief in an Ottoman destiny, alone and unaided.

T

XVII

HOW THE OTTOMAN TURK DEVELOPED

HUS far I have dealt with the Ottoman
Government, its sultans as rulers and

caliphs, its pashas, with the selection of its administrators and the part which the choice of Islam rather than Christianity had on its policy, practice, and rule. The Ottoman people was gathered by the Ottoman sultans. Under their policy the small Turkish tribe which Othman led played no such part as the Koreish tribe of Mecca from which Mohammed sprang. For three centuries his tribal kinsmen furnished the rulers and counsellors, the commanders and the provincial governors of the vast empire of the caliphate from the Indus flowing into the India Ocean to the Douro, whose narrow stream finds its way to the Atlantic at Oporto. In the flood of personal wealth which poured into the tribe of the founder of Islam, houses in Mecca rose a thousandfold in value and men who went forth to the conquest of the world with naught but sword and camel returned with the revenue of a kingdom.

No such record attended the early annals of Othman and his tribe. Meagre as his biography is, it records that he ended thirty-six years of conquest with no personal property but the tents and the herd of goats with which he began. His people founded no ruling class. Instead, the new Turkish realm absorbed the congeries of races which it found about it. The coast of Asia Minor was Greek, the interior given to the various peoples, some nomad, who filled the elevated plateau within the rimming mountains in which there start the streams which flow into the Ægean and Black Sea. In 700 years of Byzantine rule, before the battle of Mezikert (107) brought the first Turkish invasion, Greek became the language of communication for all the region and the familiar tongue of most of the cities and much of the countryside. Greek, Carian, Mysian, Lycian, Cappadocian, and Cilician were all absorbed in the new Turkish stock. How and by what means this change came we know not. As I have already pointed out, this entire region preserved almost unchanged the civilization of Rome, modified by Hellenistic culture, the later civilization of Greece. Anthropological investigations into the races of European Turkey show that what we call the Turks of European and Asiatic Turkey are closer in physical measurements to Greeks than any other people

about them and show no apparent resemblance to the Turks of central Asia. The view that a horde of Turks poured into Asia Minor, slew the original inhabitants, and keep to-day the characteristics of the region from which they came has no more basis than the assertion would have that the English to-day resemble the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes, or the Normans who invaded England for 600 years. These are gone. There remain a new race and tongue whose foundation comes from the conquering Angles and Saxons; the language has few British words but has absorbed from the vocabulary of the other conquering nations that follow.

What share each has played there is not recorded any more than in the case of the Turks of Constantinople, of Thrace, and Asia Minor. These are the core of the Turkish Empire. They organized it because they brought conquest, security, and victory. Othman's progeny gave the world the mighty sultans whose triumphs are so great and whose transgressions are so grievous. The people they welded together and to whom they gave their tongue was as much of a composite of many races as the English, "Saxon and Dane and Norman are we," as Tennyson says of the British people. great empire, as mingled as the British, the Turk and his rulers have founded. They created their verse, their architecture, their army, and their

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