XXVII

THE FRUIT OF BAD RULE AND COURTS UNFIT

T

HE absence of adequate courts and impartial justice in the Ottoman Empire made impossible the growth of internal industries. The smallest factory requires credit, banking, and the enforcement of contracts impartially for all suitors in a given jurisdiction. Ex-territoriality divided the uniform enforcement of contracts between Ottoman and consular courts and the foreigner was left in control of imports. Had Turkey been homogeneous in religion and race as was Spain at the other end of the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire would not have fallen behind the advancing march of European industry through the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The leathers of Cordova, the steel of Toledo, the stuffs of Catalonia and the wines of southern Spain and of Portugal once commanded the markets of north Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through the eighteenth they lost ground and in the nineteenth near lost to view. The merciless expulsion

of Jew and Moor in the opening of the seventeenth century by Philip III (reign 1598-1621) in defiance of the laws of God and man, of personal pledge and public faith, left Spain one in faith and in race. Its descent from the abounding power, prosperity, trade, and industrial position it held from the discovery of America to the loss of the Spanish Netherlands and its Italian possessions went on through the last half of the seventeenth and all the eighteenth century, went on without internal dislocation, social revolution, or political revolution. Not even the loss of its colonies at the beginning and the close of the nineteenth century brought shock or cataclysm. Spain remained the most interesting land in Europe, in every generation surprising countries which ignorantly deemed it decrepid, by the originality of its art and the freshness of its literature. So far as democracy consists in the intelligent and agreeable contact of human beings on a common level, mutually accepted, Spain leads the modern world. Nowhere else is the urbanity of the poor and labouring so apparent, nowhere is the pride of descent and title concealed with such gracious charm and courtesy.

Turkey was not homogeneous. Such virtues as it has had have brought it harm. The Spanish Jews to whom Ahmed I (reign 1603-1617) gra

ciously gave asylum in Salonica were the brains of the secret Committee of Union and Progress which turned out Sultan Abdul Hamid and steered the Ottoman Empire to its appalling but deserved destruction. The impartial pressure of its unremitting oppression over the Balkans prevented the Hellenization of the Bulgars and the Serb, in full progress, before the Turk appeared. Both peoples rose to drive the Turk from Europe, to divide the Balkans, and make it an active laboratory for turning out small wars and great to the confusion of the world.

Divided as the Ottoman Empire is both in race and religion the effect of the Industrial Revolution on a land whose institutions, administration, and courts made modern development impossible, rent in twain the whole structure of its economics, its social organization, and its political institutions with conflict, collision, and massacre. The first and worst fault of Islam is that it teaches the Moslem to despise those of other faiths and creeds. Nothing is so fatal as contempt to the man who indulges this besetting human sin. In a mere game like golf or bridge contempt is perilous. In a real game, like poker, contempt is suicide. When contempt is made the rule of life and its principal factor, pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Where the possession

of a particular creed or a white skin or a place in a particular race is made the basis of daily life and contact, a smash is certain. The world is made that way.

The Moslem was as uncompromising about this as was the Southern slave-holder. No Christian became a judge in days only a half century distant. The Christian was doomed to dark clothing. No gay red or yellow slippers for him, no silk caftan and no red fez. Dun colours and dark for him and his women-folk, and it was held to be "offensive" to display his prosperity and ride a horse. An ass for him. The feeling in my childhood in Turkey about these things was precisely similar to that felt in a Southern city when a negro family turns out visibly owning and, still more "offensive" visibly enjoying the ownership, of a Packard or a Pierce-Arrow. It is not prohibited by law. Neither were gay clothing for the Christian in Turkish cities, but it was perilous, all the same. Where contempt is the attitude of the superior and more powerful, contempt hereditary, immemorial, constant, preventing intermarriage, social relations, and nearly all the personal contacts of life and this contempt is based on race and religion, factors practically unchangeable in the East, the prosperity of the less powerful race packs the situation with dynamite.

Prosperity and opportunity began to come to the Christian races of Turkey about a century ago. The agreement as to the status of the Jew and the Moor in Spain rested on various agreements which culminated at the surrender of Grenada, 1492. Those who wished went to Africa. Those who remained kept their property and were given civil rights in trade, residence, and courts, though at a disadvantage in the latter. They were excluded from Government service, from the universities, army and navy, their residence was confined to certain quarters, and there were restrictions on the purchase of realty. These were substantially the status of Christian populations under Turkish rule. In Spain, the Jews became the bankers and moneylenders of the kingdoms and the traffic of the realm went into the hands of Moors. In a century both were expelled. When the settlements of the Huguenots were completed, 1598, they, too, were cut off from the civil and military service of the state, its universities and the learned callings. Intermarriage was forbidden unless the children were of the ruling faith, and there were limitations on residence, domicile and property rights. They became the bankers and moneylenders of France, foreign trade with England, the Netherlands, and Protestant Germany was in their hands, and they had in these lands special advan