The Turkish State of Mind

I

THE present state of mind of the Turks is revolutionary. This feature of it must have struck every foreign observer who has visited Angora within the past five or six years (as the present writer visited it in April 1923, during the interval between the first and second phases of the Lausanne Conference). In this improvised seat of government in the drowsy interior of Anatolia, the hum and stir of revolution is unmistakable. The place is alive with that demoniac energy — part defensive and part constructive — which is awakened in bees when their hive is disturbed or in ants when some intruder places a clumsy foot upon the ant’s nest. In this atmosphere you are conscious of the France of 1793 and of all the revolutions between that date and this in the Old World and the New. The men of Angora are themselves consciously inspired by the French Revolutionary ideas of a century ago; and formulæ which to contemporary Frenchmen seem platitudes or fallacies are to them exciting and dynamic verities.

A closer inspection, however, reveals that this is not an ‘evolutionary revolution’ (if such an apparently contradictory expression may be allowed). Most of the famous revolutions of history have been revolutionary only on the surface. Superficially, there has been an explosion, and a violent breach with the past; but, deeper down, the changes thus suddenly made manifest have usually been maturing for generations past, and the revolutionary symptoms which fill the foreground at short range fade away, on a larger view, into a hardly perceptible acceleration of a continuous development. Such were the English, American, and French Revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the last analysis, the changes which they introduced were all stages in a single line of advance. The Turkish Revolution, on the other hand, is revolutionary through and through. The very consciousness of French precedent and inspiration is due to the fact that whatever is French, or indeed whatever is Western, is ipso facto not the Turk’s natural background and therefore is not something which the Turk can take for granted. The true parallels to the present Turkish Revolution are not the historic revolutions in England, America, and France — which, after all, were family affairs within the bosom of Western society — but those spiritual conversions, those abandonments of one civilization or way of life and adoptions of another, of which the most familiar modern examples are the ‘Westernization’ of Russia by Peter the Great and of the Greek nation by the Greeks themselves in the eighteenth century, and of Japan in the nineteenth century by the deliberate act of a few Japanese statesmen.

The best way to realize the greatness of the mental change involved is to remind ourselves of the mental background and outlook of an educated Turk in, say, 1525, when Suleiman the Magnificent was on the eve of conquering Hungary and laying siege to Vienna. Let us imagine ourselves face to face with one of Suleiman’s ministers of state or high military officers or provincial governors-general. In 1525 these coveted posts were not to be had by influence or intrigue, still less by the possession of a Parisian accent or a Western education. They could be won only by going through the mill of an intensive and intensely competitive education, which began at the age of seven (when the candidates were torn away from their families, as Plato proposed to do with the children who were to be trained as guardians of his ideal Republic) and which ended at about the age of twenty in the case of those who had not in the meantime been rejected as unfit for the highest posts and been assigned to some inferior branch of the military and civil services.

The training given during this long course was extremely varied. At an early stage the boys were attached to the households of Turkish feudal squires in Asia Minor, in order that their character and physique might be developed by working on the land. Later they were collected in the military academies of the capital, where they led a corporate life under iron discipline and were given as thorough an education in classical literature as in the arts of war and government. At every stage the system was vigorously selective and competitive. In this and in its austerity it resembled the educational system of ancient Sparta; but the Osmanli, unlike the Spartan, lawgiver made use of the financial incentive by rewarding efficiency with increased rates of pay, and he did not overvalue the body in comparison with the mind. Indeed, in his respect for literary education he came nearer to the liberalized version of the Spartan system which was conceived by Plato; and there is some irony in the fact — which is a sober truth and not a paradox—that the education given by the Ottoman Government to the ‘tribute-children’ taken from the subject Christians (the source from which the rulers of the Ottoman Empire at this time were drawn) was the nearest approximation to Plato’s ideal that has ever yet been actually realized on Greek soil.

There was nothing Greek, however, about the origin of these Turkish institutions, remarkable though their analogies with the Platonic Republic and with Sparta were. This system of training, which in its zenith made the Ottoman Empire the most efficient and therefore the most powerful state in the world, was brought, by the founders of the empire, from the distant steppes of Central Asia, where the composite nomadic communities of men, horses, dogs, and cattle could not survive a single season unless all their members, human and animal, were sternly trained from infancy to perform their several functions in coöperation. Again, the literary education with which the wisdom of the Osmanli lawgiver had supplemented the simple training of the steppes, in order to fit the descendants of the nomad conquerors to hold their own in a more complicated environment, was not based on the ancient languages of Greece or Rome or on the contemporary vernaculars of Western Europe. It was a study of the Arabic and Persian classics and of the Islamic culture which they embodied — a culture which, it is true, had many points of contact with that of the West, but which in essence had followed a separate line of growth since either had emerged from the débris of Hellenism.

This training — created by the blending of several historical experiences, but to which little or nothing had been contributed by the experience of either Oriental or Western Christendom— led the Ottoman governing class of the sixteenth century to look down, with a sense of superiority tempered by detachment, upon the Oriental Christian peasants over whom they ruled and upon the Western Christian merchants whom they admitted, on sufferance, as strangers within their gates. The peasants were known as Ra’iyyat, or ‘human cattle,’—a term which the Osmanlis borrowed from the Arab conquerors of the first age of Islam, just as the present British rulers of India have borrowed it, in the garbled form of ‘Ryot,’ from the Osmanlis’ kinsmen, the Mughals, — and the Osmanli rulers felt toward them much as their forefathers had felt toward the real cattle on which their nomadic livelihood had depended. They were to be protected by the Pax Ottomanica from being raided by the owners of neighboring herds, and in season they were to be milked and shorn by their lords and masters. Otherwise they might go their own way and graze at will. As for the Western traders whose settlements were tolerated at a few points in the Ottoman Empire, such as Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, and Alexandria, the sixteenth-century Osmanli regarded them as the nomad regards the sedentary hucksters and craftsmen in the rare oases which break the uniformity of his pasture lands — a despicable but not a dangerous people, who know how to produce those few commodities which the nomad cannot make for himself in his otherwise self-contained mode of existence, and with whom intercourse is therefore to be maintained, though on very distant terms.

It will be seen that three hundred years ago — and three centuries is not a long period in the history of a community — the Western inspiration, which to-day is the dynamic force in the life of the Turkish ruling class, played no part in their life at all. The only common ground between Osmanlis and Westerners at that date was in the art of war, in which new inventions are always borrowed more rapidly than in other departments of social life, because the penalty for not borrowing them is political extinction; and here the Osmanlis gave to the West at least as much as they took from her. They borrowed the artillery with which they breached the walls of Constantinople and overthrew the cavalry of Shah Isma’il and the Mamluks. They gave to Europe, though they started as an equestrian people, the first regular infantry which she had known since the disappearance of the Roman legions. Their influence upon the military development of the West can be traced in the uniforms of eighteenth and nineteenth century Western armies and in a number of exotic military terms, like ‘Uhlan,’ ‘dolman,’ or ‘shako.’ The monuments of their military ascendancy can be seen in a museum — once the Byzantine Church of St. Irene — within the precincts of the Sultan’s palace in Stamboul, where morions, breasts-and-backs, halberds, arquebuses, and all the other equipment with which our Western ancestors went forth to war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be seen to this day, piled up in amazing profusion, as trophies of battles in which the Osmanli (whoso spoils of this date are not so common in Western museums) had proved himself the better fighting man.

II

Let us now pass over two centuries and a half and look at the rulers of the Ottoman Empire in 1774, when the most momentous of the many RussoTurkish wars had been concluded by the signature of an ignominious peace treaty. By this date the Ottoman institutions had grievously broken down — the ban upon the inheritance of honors and position, which had been the necessary corollary of a scientific selection and training of rulers, having proved too difficult for human nature — and the day of the Ottoman Empire had departed. The Osmanlis had been utterly beaten, on land and sea, by one Christian Power single-handed — and that not by any Power of the West, that fragment of Christendom which the Osmanlis had never succeeded in conquering, but by an Oriental Christian people, the coreligionists of the Osmanli’s despised Oriental Christian ‘cattle’ and themselves not long ago the ‘cattle’ of the Osmanli’s Tatar cousins on the Volga. By what arts had these Russian ‘cattle’ learned to defeat their traditional masters? This was the question which exercised every intelligent and patriotic Turk during the next generation, and there was no doubt about the true answer. The Russians had secured their triumph of 1774 because, for almost a century before that, they had been deliberately discarding their old barbaric methods of warfare and had been industriously adopting the methods of the West, which, since the day of Suleiman the Magnificent, had been imperceptibly but steadily forging ahead of the Ottoman Empire in the arts of war and peace alike. In the war of 1768-1774, the Osmanlis had been defeated not so much by the Russians as by the new Western weapons and tactics in Russian hands; and if they were to save the remnants of their Empire — now threatened on three sides by the Russians established on the Black Sea coast, by the Austrians pressing down the Danube, and by the French and English who had succeeded the Spaniards and Osmanlis as rival aspirants to the naval command of the Mediterranean — their only hope was to follow the Russian example. This gives the key to Turkish history from the signature of the Russo-Turkish peace treaty of Küchük Kainarja in 1774 down to that of the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918.

During this period of nearly a century and a half, which terminated less than seven years ago, there were perpetual attempts in Turkey at ‘reform’ on Western lines, but these attempts were uniformly unsuccessful owing to certain fatal limitations in the mental standpoint from which they were made. All this time, the Turks were concentrating their efforts upon preserving the old bottles from which the old wine had long ago evaporated or leaked away; and, as if this misdirection of energy were not enough in itself to carry them further along the road to ruin, they attempted — of all methods! — to accomplish their object by pouring in successive doses of new wine! Almost all the Turkish ‘reformers’ of this period, from Sultans Selim III and Mahmud II at the beginning of it down to the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress at the end, were inspired by the same idea of adopting the new Western military technique in order to save the remaining institutions and the remaining territories of the old Ottoman Empire.

Inevitably, of course, the reforms spread beyond the strictly military sphere, since the maintenance of an army on the modern Western model is so expensive and so intricate a business that it demands certain standards of finance, hygiene, and higher education. Accordingly the building-up of a Westernized Turkish Army carried with it the development of Western schools of medicine, law, and diplomacy — since, now that the Western Powers had the upper hand, it was necessary for the Turks to treat with them continually on equal or inferior terms instead of from time to time dictating conditions of peace. There were also one or two notable reformers who had a larger vision — for example, Midhat Pasha, whose career fell within the twenty years between the Crimean War and the accession of Abdul-Hamid, when the Ottoman Empire, temporarily relieved from the Russian menace and stimulated by her close association with the two most liberal of the West European Powers, had a better chance than either before or after of making the new wine and the old bottles agree together.

Midhat Pasha laid emphasis, not upon the Westernization of the Army, but upon that of the civil administration and the higher educational system; but even he was aiming at an impossible objective. He aspired, by these deeper reforms, to reconcile the non-Turkish elements in the Empire and to make loyal citizens out of seditious subject populations, and his best work was devoted — and therefore given in vain — to those then Ottoman provinces which now constitute the independent national states of Bulgaria and ‘Iraq. He did not realize that you could not introduce some ingredients of the new wine into the old bottles without the remainder, and that this remainder included the idea of nationality — a fundamental principle of modern Western society which was bound, as it fermented in the cracked and perished tissues of the Ottoman Empire, to disrupt them sooner or later. The last act in his career — in which the veteran liberal statesman was outmanœuvred by the new Sultan, Abdul-Hamid, with his autocratic ideals — was to attempt the introduction of constitutional government, with a parliament composed of Greek and Serb and Bulgar deputies from Rumelia, Arab deputies from Syria, ‘Iraq, and the Yemen, Bedawi deputies from the desert fringes, and Albanian and Kurdish deputies from the untamed mountains, as well as Turkish deputies from the homelands of the Osmanli Turkish people in Anatolia, Thrace, and Constantinople. He did not face the fact — though it stared him in the face in the history of a generation of political fiascos in the new Oriental Christian states of Greece and Serbia — that to introduce the highly specialized and exotic political institutions of the West into a nonWestern state, even when it contained a nationally more or less homogeneous population, was a task almost too difficult for statesmanship to accomplish, and that, a fortiori, it was a sheer impossibility in an empire compounded of discordant nationalities with nothing in common in their political traditions except the adverse fact that Western institutions were equally alien to them all. Midhat’s constitution would have perished even if Abdul-Hamid had not extinguished it in anticipation of its natural term; yet the Turkish reformers learned so little during the generation that followed Midhat’s failure that the first act of the Committee of Union and Progress, when they overthrew the Hamidian autocracy in 1908, was to reinstate the constitution of 1876 and summon all the conflicting nationalities of the Empire once more to coöperate in a common parliamentary government as loyal Ottoman citizens.

The failure of the C. U. P. between 1908 and 1918 was more signal than Midhat’s failure had been a generation earlier — partly because an unkind Fate gave them the time to carry their impossible experiment to its inevitably disastrous conclusion, and partly because they had inherited Midhat’s programme without his liberality of mind. When the non-Turkish nationalities of the Empire — themselves inspired by those Western influences which were now in flood tide — omitted to fall in with the policy of ‘Ottomanization’ and continued, as was only natural and human in the circumstances, to concentrate their hopes and efforts upon their own national self-development, the ‘Young Turks’ attempted to coerce them by those ‘methods of barbarism’ by which Mahmud II had disposed of the Janissaries and Mehmed ‘Ali of the Mamluks. This reckless and reactionary policy steered the Ottoman Empire straight upon the rocks, where the hulk, battered by the storms of centuries, was dashed to pieces in the tempests of the Balkan War of 1912-13 and the Great War of 1914-18. By their programme of forcible Ottomanization the C. U. P. contrived not only to drive their remaining Christian subjects in the Balkan Peninsula to desperation, and so to call into existence a hostile coalition of the independent Balkan States, but also to alienate the Albanians, Kurds, Arabs, and other nonTurkish Muslim peoples of the Empire, who, but for this provocation, might not have been awakened to national consciousness for many years to come. Thus, while the Balkan War deprived Turkey of her last European provinces except the Thracian hinterland of Constantinople, the Great War deprived her of Arab and Kurdish provinces which in extent — though not in cultivable area or population — represented fully half of what had been Turkey-in-Asia. The Armistice signed at Mudros on October 30, 1918, placed the Allied Navies, including the Greek Navy, in command of the Straits and Constantinople, and the Allied Armies, under General Allenby, in command of the passes leading from Syria into Anatolia, while the Turkish forces which had survived General Allenby’s crowning victory were to be demobilized and disarmed by Interallied control officers. The Ottoman Empire was unmistakably in articulo mortis. At that moment no one — and perhaps least of all the Turks themselves — suspected that the Turkish national state was on the eve of being born.

III

In reality, the situation created by the outcome of the Great War was more favorable to the Turkish people, as opposed to the Ottoman Empire, than any in which they had found themselves since they had abandoned their ancestral institutions and their glory had departed from them. To begin with, the Ottoman Empire was not the only empire which had foundered in the storm. The Russian Empire, which had been its most formidable enemy for a century and a half, had gone down with it and had been replaced by a strange new Power which was fighting desperately for its existence against the surviving Powers of the Entente, and which was therefore ready to make common cause with any enemies of the Tsardom or of Great Britain and France. Again, the German Reich, whose friendship had been only less dangerous to Turkey than the Russian Empire’s enmity, was paralyzed by defeat, and the Germans who had installed themselves in Turkey during the war were now expelled by the victors. Finally, the victors themselves, for all their apparent omnipotence, were exhausted by the war, in the last phase of which they had been on the verge of defeat, and were concentrating their energies on imposing the severest possible peace-terms upon their principal opponent, Germany. For all the Principal Allies, Turkey was a quite secondary concern, and they followed the line of least resistance in making Greece, who had local national aspirations to satisfy, their bailiff and executioner in Thrace and Anatolia. Greece, however, with her limited resources and her fatal internal factions, proved a broken reed; while the Principal Allies, apart from their preoccupations in other fields, were inhibited by their long-standing mutual rivalries in the Levant from effectively supporting either Greece or one another. Thus, from the moment of the Armistice of October 1918, the Turks found themselves relieved of most of their former enemies and reënforced by new allies, the Bolsheviki, in an unexpected quarter. Yet these changes in the external situation, favorable though they were, would have brought little profit to Turkey if there had not been a simultaneous change in the position and outlook of the Turks themselves.

As far as their position was concerned, they were at last completely relieved, through the good offices of their enemies, of the incubus of the Ottoman Empire. The non-Turkish provinces and populations, which in the sixteenth century had provided the necessary ways and means for the selection, training, and maintenance of the ruling Osmanli corps d’élite, had become nothing but a burden to the Turkish people since the old institutions had broken down. For centuries they had exhausted their energies in the unprofitable attempt to hold these alien provinces to their allegiance, and now at last this barren chapter in their history was closed. Simultaneously — and this was a feature of the utmost importance — the attitude of the Turks toward the Ottoman Empire was transformed. With the Interallied occupation of the Straits, in November 1918, and the Greek occupation of Smyrna in the following May, the homelands of the Ottoman Turkish people in Thrace and Anatolia were seriously threatened for the first time in their history since the transitory invasion of Timur the Great at the beginning of the fifteenth century; and therewith that Western-inspired consciousness of nationality, which had come to life a century earlier in the subject Greeks and Serbs, was suddenly awakened in the hitherto imperially minded Turks. The shock of finding their homelands in danger dissipated finally from their minds the disastrous ambition to maintain their rule over other peoples.

The programme of the new Turkish national movement which was thus quickened to consciousness by the landing of the Greeks at Smyrna on May 16, 1919, was first formulated in the celebrated Turkish ‘National Pact’ or solemn league and covenant of 1920. In this short but pithy document, the striking feature — particularly when the Pact is compared with the programmes of previous Turkish reformers — is the sober renunciation of claims and the rigid limitation of objectives. Implicitly the European provinces west of Thrace, and explicitly the Arab provinces south of the Armistice line of October 30, 1918, are abandoned; and the Turkish energies thus released are concentrated, first, upon preserving the integral possession of Thrace, Anatolia, and Constantinople for the Turkish nation, and secondly upon making the nation mistress of its own house within these national limits.

The new Nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Bey, had thus learned a lesson which had never been learned by Mahmud II or by Abdul-Hamid or by the Committee of Union and Progress; for these earlier reformers had all been led astray by grandiose visions before they had set their own house in order. Mahmud had spent his energies in vain attempts to reconquer Greece and to bring Mehmed ‘Ali to heel in Egypt. Abdul-Hamid, when his own empire was threatened with partition, busied himself with reviving the doubtful and contested title of the Ottoman Dynasty to the Caliphate — that is, to the political, not the spiritual, headship of the Sunni Muslim community throughout the world — a claim which was bound to get him into trouble with all colonial Powers, including those which were otherwise not unfriendly to Turkey, like the British Empire. Again, the Committee of Union and Progress, though they were determined to prevent the Sultan from recovering the autocratic power of which they deprived him in the revolution of 1908, had not the strength of mind to forgo the shadowy prestige of the Caliphate, although the traditional prerogatives of the Caliphate according to Islamic canon law were irreconcilable with the limitations of constitutional monarchy on the Western model. They still attempted to represent the Ottoman Sultan, whom they had made their puppet at home, as the true Commander of the Faithful in the eyes of Muslims in partibus infidelium. Not content with promoting Pan-Islamism in this and other forms (though they personally were mostly Western-educated agnostics), they were inspired by reading the works of a Western historian, M. Léon Cahun, to take up ‘Pan-Turanianism ‘ — a sort of doctrinaire supernationalism which aimed at a rapprochement between the various Turkish-speaking peoples scattered through the length and breadth of Europe and Asia from Yakutsk to Constantinople and from the Urals to the Tian-Shan.

By contrast, the new Turkish Nationalists have shown the comparative soundness of their political judgment in steadily refusing to have anything to do with either of these forms of megalomania. They realized at once that Pan-Turanianism would lose them the support of Soviet Russia, since nearly all the Turks in the world outside the borders of Turkey are to be found in the territories of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics; and that Pan-Islamism, while equally calculated to alienate them from Soviet Russia, would also prevent an ultimate reconciliation with Great Britain and France, who were the two Powers with the largest number of Muslim subjects in the world. The attitude of the new Turkish Nationalists on these questions — an attitude which the present writer has ascertained in personal conversation with some of their leaders — is quite clear. ‘For centuries,’ they say, ‘we have been fighting the battles of Islam and forgetting our own national development. Why should we sacrifice ourselves any longer? We have vindicated our national independence against tremendous odds and at a terrible cost in the war of 1919-1922. If other Muslim peoples prize liberty as highly as we, let them go and do likewise. We waged and won our national war of independence single-handed. Now that we have made favorable treaties, not only with Soviet Russia but with Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, what obligation have we to embroil ourselves again with our powerful neighbors in order to help the Arabs (who, after all, threw us over in 1915) to throw off the tutelage of the Mandatory Powers, or in order to help our Azerbaijani or Bashkir Turkish kinsmen (who, after all, possess autonomy within the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics) to secede from the federation to which they now belong? Let them mind their business and let us mind ours.’

This feature in the present Turkish state of mind is important and encouraging, for it means that the new Turkey will be ready to live and let live as a good citizen of international society. It is true that there is one serious territorial issue still outstanding in the Turco-British controversy over the Mosul Vilayet. The genesis of this controversy lies in the fact that the Turks, after renouncing their claim to dominion over the Arabs, had not the strength of mind to carry this policy to its logical conclusion by also renouncing their ambition to assimilate the Kurds. Sooner or later this attempt, which will break down as soon as the spirit of nationalism catches the Kurds in their turn, will involve the Turks in fresh misfortunes. Meanwhile the Mosul controversy, serious though it is, has been reduced to the dimensions of a boundary-dispute which is in a fair way to being settled by the intermediation of the Council of the League of Nations.

IV

While, however, the Turks, under their present leadership, have taken on the whole a moderate view of what their national domain should be, they have been adamantine in insisting that their territorial claims were an irreducible minimum; and, having obtained these claims in full —an achievement of which not many contemporary nations can boast, — they have been no less adamantine in asserting their mastery within their frontiers.

In order to understand the internal policy of Kemal Pasha and his party — a policy which has gradually taken precedence over their military and territorial aims as these have been progressively realized — it is necessary to grasp that, for the Turks of to-day, the dominating question is one of status. The Turks, like the Jews, have been, since they first made contact with the West, a ‘peculiar people’; and while this is an enviable position so long as you are ‘top-dog,’with a status like the Spartan’s in ancient Lacedæmon or the English Sahib’s in modern India, it becomes an intolerable humiliation as soon as the rôles are reversed. The Pharisee would hardly have thanked God for being not as other men were if Pharisees in the circle where he belonged had been labeled ‘unspeakable.’ He would have prayed to be made indistinguishable from the publicans and the Gentiles, and this is the state of mind at which the Turks have arrived to-day, though three centuries ago their attitude toward the infidels of the West was much the same as that of the Pharisees in the parable. From despising the West they have passed, first to a lukewarm willingness to adopt the minimum amount of Western technique which might be necessary to salvation in this world, and finally to a passionate desire to be admitted as full members of Western society in order to escape from the terrible position of being its pariahs. In this respect the psychological similarity between the new Turkish Nationalism and the Zionist Movement is unmistakable. In both cases the status of a ‘peculiar people’ has ceased to be a source of pride and has become a source of humiliation; and in both cases, therefore, a strong movement has arisen to escape from it.

It remains to review briefly the various fields in which the Turks have been putting their new policy of ‘normalcy’ (on a Western norm) into practice during the three years since their victory over the Greeks set their hands free for internal reform. They have attempted systematically to Westernize their relations with resident aliens, with non-Turkish minorities, and with one another.

The social, juridical, and economic position of aliens in Turkey has been assimilated to their position in Western countries by the abolition of the Capitulations — an abolition which was provided for in the two treaties signed by the Turkish Government at Lausanne in 1923, one with the Allies and the other with the United States. In virtue of the Capitulations, the foreign communities in Turkey had lived under the extraterritorial jurisdiction of their own diplomatic and consular authorities, had enjoyed immunity from many Ottoman taxes, and had been privileged to import and export goods at tariff’s fixed by treaty, which the Ottoman Government had no power to alter unilaterally.

In the sixteenth century, when the first Capitulations were granted to Western traders by Ottoman Sultans, the proportion borne by their trade to the total trade of the Ottoman Empire was so small, and their home governments were so weak, militarily and even navally, in comparison with the Porte, that these privileges were of no consequence. The Sultans then tolerated the presence of these Westerners in their dominions, but could not be bothered to administer them. Three centuries later, when Western commercial interests had become the chief economic forces in Turkey and when the private representatives of these interests had the backing of Governments which held the Ottoman Empire at their mercy, the Capitulations had come to exercise a strangle-hold over the economic life of the country. The insistence of the Turks upon abolishing them is therefore not only natural but legitimate, though the suddenness of the change — due to the fact that the Turkish Revolution has come about precipitately, as the result of war — has imposed hardships upon individuals and may also have given a temporary setback to the economic development of Turkey by causing some valuable foreign concerns to go out of business.

The second problem with which the Turks have had to deal is that of the non-Turkish minorities — those former ‘cattle’ of the old Osmanli ruling class to whom the latter, in their contemptuous aloofness, had granted an autonomy not unlike that which they had granted to the foreign Western trading communities. So long as these minorities — or, rather, subject majorities, as they were before the bulk of them separated from Turkey through the secession of the Balkan States — duly paid their tribute in children and money and kind, it mattered little to their rulers how they managed their own communal affairs. If a Greek wanted to go to law with a Greek or a Jew with a Jew, let the bishop and the rabbi sec to it. Why trouble the kadi? Here, again, privileges which had been granted with impunity in the sixteenth century had become excessively dangerous when these autonomous non-Turkish communities within the Ottoman Empire possessed independent states of their own nationality to look to, to which they ardently desired to secede, and when their political aspirations were supported by the sympathy of the great nations of the West.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that — as often happens where several communities of unequal political status are intermingled territorially — the different nationalities of the Ottoman Empire had become identified to a large extent with different classes and occupations. While the Turks formed the majority of the agricultural population in their own homelands, monopolized the higher ranks of the civil administration and the army throughout the Empire, and shared with the other Muslim elements the burden of compulsory military service, the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews — relieved of military service by the easy alternative of an exemption tax — devoted themselves to trade and industry, and made their position in these callings so strong that the Turks, with more honored and less arduous professions open to them, left these fields virtually uncontested to their non-Turkish fellow-citizens. The political and economic dangers of this state of affairs — which were both accentuated during the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia in 19191922, when the local Greek minority naturally took sides with their invading kinsmen — so deeply impressed the Turkish Nationalists that, in the National Pact of 1920, they declared their intention of reducing the privileges of the non-Turkish minorities to the level (though not below the level) of the much more modest rights which had been secured to minorities in the newly created or enlarged states in Europe, under the treaties for the protection of minorities which the Governments of these states had recently signed at the instance of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. This formula was eventually embodied in the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, and thereby the juridical assimilation of the status of minorities in Turkey to their status in Europe was brought about.

In the meantime, however, the problem had been solved much more drastically in practice by the flight or expulsion of the minorities from all the Anatolian and Thracian territories which the Turks recovered in 1922, except for Greeks domiciled bona fide in Constantinople. This exodus — with its counterpart in the exodus of the Turkish minority from the Greek territories in Macedonia — is unparalleled in its scale and has been accompanied by an appalling amount of material loss and human suffering; but here, again, the process of Westernization can be seen at work. In the summer of 1922, Western Turkey and Northern Greece were still countries of mixed nationality, like carpets woven on an Oriental pattern. To-day, they are both almost as homogeneous as Italy or France or England; and these new homogeneous national states may possibly succeed in establishing genuine parliamentary government on Western lines where the attempt was altogether beyond the powers of those mixed multitudes which occupied the same territories a few years ago.

V

The most radical, and the most interesting, of the changes introduced by the Nationalists are those affecting the political, social, and economic life of the Turkish nation itself.

Their first political act after the signature of the Mudania Armistice in the autumn of 1922 was to abolish the Ottoman Sultanate and vest the sovereignty of Turkey in the Great National Assembly at Angora. This marked, juridically, the end of an empire which had been so completely the creation of the Ottoman Dynasty that it bore the Dynasty’s name, and the substitution for it, in the homelands of the Osmanli Turkish people, of a Turkish Republic. By this act the Turks — who had suffered from the existence of the Ottoman Empire as acutely, in their way, as the nonTurkish nationalities — were at length liberated from it as the Serbs, Greeks, Rumans, Bulgars, and Albanians had been liberated by the successive foundation of their respective national states in the course of the preceding century — L’Empire Ottoman est mart; vive la Turquie!

This abolition of the Sultanate is advantageous to Turkey from three points of view. In the first place, as has just been explained, it is a symbol that the Turkish State exists, at least in intention, for the benefit not of a dynasty but of the Turkish people. In old times, the Turkish budget was one of the smallest and the Ottoman Sultan’s civil list conspicuously the largest in Europe. Now — and here lies the second advantage — this unremunerative expense has been cut away; and at the same time the Angora Government has closed the overstaffed and lavishly equipped public offices in Stamboul, which had served the administration of a great empire, and has substituted for them new public offices at Angora, improvised on the modest scale suitable for a young national state. In addition to this financial saving, there is a third advantage of a political order. In non-Western countries seeking to adjust, themselves to Western civilization, the presence of an old established native dynasty has invariably proved a source of weakness. In Persia, Morocco, and elsewhere, native autocrats have proved ready to place themselves at the disposal of foreign Governments in order to obtain the support of those Governments for the maintenance of their traditional authority over their subjects; and, in Turkey itself, both the Committee of Union and Progress and the present Nationalists have had disagreeable experiences of the kind in recent years. AbdulHamid, after accepting the Constitution at the sword’s point in 1908, almost succeeded in recovering his despotic authority by force in 1909; and though, since that time, the de facto rulers of Turkey have invariably been careful to keep a nonentity on the throne, they, rightly or wrongly, accuse the late Sultan, Vahydu’d Din Efendi, of having worked against the Turkish Nationalists on behalf of the Allies, deliberately and not under duress, during the Allied Occupation of Constantinople in 1918-1923. The abolition of the Sultanate reassures the Turkish mind that this breach in the solidarity of the national defenses will never be opened again.

A much more revolutionary act has been the abolition of the Caliphate and the disestablishment of the Islamic Church — an act which has made the Turkish Republic an état laïque like the United States or France. In this connection it is important to note that the exploitation of the title of Caliph is of recent date, though the Ottoman Dynasty had laid claim to it ever since it first rose to greatness, while the same title was likewise assumed, with as much or as little legitimacy, by the Mughal Emperors of India and by most other prominent Islamic dynasties in modern times. By tradition the Caliph is the temporal, not the spiritual, ruler of all True Believers — the Roman Emperor (or Holy Roman Emperor), not the Pope, of the Islamic World. Accordingly, when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith, the title was of little value to its sovereigns, since they already bore effective temporal rule over their own Muslim subjects as Ottoman Padishahs, while any claim on their part to exercise authority over the subjects of other Muslim sovereigns would not have been admitted by the latter. The situation changed when almost every other independent Islamic Empire disappeared, when the Ottoman Empire itself lost one province after another, containing Muslim populations, to Christian Powers, and when Turks educated in the West imbibed the specifically Western doctrine of the distinction of temporal and spiritual powers.

These changes suggested the new policy of misrepresenting the Ottoman Caliph as a spiritual authority analogous to the Christian Pope, and asserting his right to the spiritual allegiance, not only of his Muslim ex-subjects in the lost provinces of the Ottoman Empire, but of the former Muslim subjects of defunct Islamic Empires, like the Mughal Empire in India, or the Muslim subjects of non-Muslim Powers like China or the Netherlands. This was the policy of Abdul-Hamid, which the Committee of Union and Progress attempted to carry on; and even the Nationalists, when they abolished the Sultanate in 1922, at first set out to maintain the Caliphate as a separate and exclusively ‘spiritual’ office vested in a member of the deposed Ottoman Dynasty. A Pope, however, is an awkward guest for a sovereign national state, and the Turkish experiment of maintaining the Caliph as Pope was abandoned after little more than a year’s trial. Who shall say that the Turks were not wise in these second thoughts?

These are the principal political changes which the Turkish Nationalists have introduced in three years, and even this brief account will show how much more profound this Turkish revolution is than any which we Westerners have experienced — at any rate, since our revolutionary conversion to an Oriental religion some thirteen centuries ago. The policy of Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s Government can only be judged by time, and then, possibly, it will be judged less on its political results than on its social and economic results, which are the ultimate object of policy. In the social and economic sphere there are three main developments to watch: the movement for the emancipation of women; the movement for the modernization of agriculture; and the movement for the entry of individual Turks into trade and manufacture, in place of the vanished nonTurkish minorities. On the success of these three movements the future of the new Turkey depends.