tourists to invade the country of the Turk en masse since the days before the war arrived in Constantinople early this spring on a great ocean-liner making the Mediterranean cruise. They brought with them a set of very definite preconceived ideas. During their brief stay these ideas underwent a vigorous upsetting. When they left, it was with a sense of having been tricked, fooled, cheated, not by the Turks, but by those who had talked and written against them. They had come prepared to meet the bogy-man of the Bosporus, and the bogy-man had not even said, "Boo!" When the Americans-there were several hundred-reached Constantinople, they were eager for exploration, yet fearful. There were tales aboard. This was the land of the Turk. The Turk was an amber-skinned man who wore a red fez, and carried a long, curved knife dripping with blood. Down in the seething mass along the shores were men with amber skins and red fezes. To be sure, they carried on their backs and in their hands great baskets heaped with luscious-looking oranges, trays full of green vegetables, and sugary white mounds of locume. Nowhere in evidence was the long, curved knife of the comic papers at home. The trippers decided that baskets. Then they recalled massacred Armenians, fleeing refugees, villages in ruins, and shuddered. A ship's officer warned them it was dangerous to go ashore, and announced that neither the steamship company nor the captain would be responsible. Being reassured by resident Americans, they landed. They bought out the venders in Galata, and allowed themselves to be charged double prices in the old blue-vaulted corridors of the great bazaar at Stamboul. They ate the sweetmeats, and danced madly in the cabarets. A favored few drank the sultan's coffee, smoked his cigarettes, and stood in curious, solemn lines outside the palace of Yildiz to watch him go to prayers on the day of the selamlik. Meantime they asked questions. Their answers came largely from the resident Americans, naval officers, members of the embassy staff, relief workers, and representatives of Standard Oil and other American business interests, and they proved a distinct surprise. They went away, these American globe-trotters, quite thoroughly convinced that there are two sides to the Turkish question. Before the season was over, other ships arrived. The number of tourists mounted from the hundreds into the thousands. More questions were asked and answered. All of them, when they sailed away from Constantinople, had undergone the experience of their predecessors. The propaganda had overshot the mark. Nations, like men, are largely the sum of their reactions to their friends and enemies among their neighbors. The continuation of propaganda which presents the Turk always with his curving knife, and takes no count of factors, economic, social, political, and religious, responsible for his impulses and acts, will never help toward a real understanding of the NearEastern problem. If the capital of the Turk were off on some obscure by-path of the world, it is possible that the picture of the bleeding knife might in time give place to a lovely pastoral filled with dark-skinned shepherds herding Angora goats. It is partly because Constantinople has the ill fortune to sit in the middle of the highroad of commerce between Europe and Asia that she has such an evil reputation. No one need minimize the suffering of the Armenians and other minority peoples of the Near East, but it should be possible to look behind the atrocity story and discover the ele ments that make Turkey what she is to-day and find out what she may become to-morrow. The atrocity story has blinded sharper eyes than ours all down the ages, yet we never seem to become sophisticated about it. Religious antagonisms have long been used for the political and economic advantage of one or another power. Frequently they have been deliberately created and carefully nursed for the benefit of an ambitious ruler. Turkey of to-day is not the arrogant, gilded, strutting despot of AbdulHamid's time, nor yet the cocky, conquering warrior of Enver and Talaat's day. It is a young man in a shabby, old garment, fantastic and childlike in his dreaming, perhaps, but magnificent in his singleness of purpose, and a power with which to reckon despite his poverty. The Turkey diplomats talked about when they made the Treaty of Sèvres, and the Turkey of Mustapha Kemal, which went to Paris to unmake that treaty, were two entirely different entities. What has happened to bring about this change? What does it mean not only in the settlement of the Near-Eastern tangle, but in the · economic readjustment of the world? This new Turkey, fighting for its national life with the Greeks in Asia Minor, is as yet scarcely more than a name on a facile tongue, a light in an ardent eye, a hope in an impassioned heart. But it is all the Turkey there is worth mentioning to-day. And it is perhaps the most astonishing phenomenon of this aftermath of war, for though it is not to England's liking, it was more than half made in Downing Street. Those who look on Turkey from a distance with the eye of the casual observer have little idea of the vitality and extent of the nationalist movement. It has what military power there is, what hope, what discipline. It has the support of all but the tiniest portion of the populace of what is left of that once mighty Turkish Empire. Though there are two governments side by side in Turkey, no one pretends that the Constantinople government functions. I met New Turkey personified for largely smuggled diamonds and Russian wives, and an American destroyer, there were no boats to ripple the still, blue waters in the once lively Russian port. the first time in Moscow last January, from Constantinople whose cargo was when I dined at the Turkish embassy with Ali Fouad, ambassador from the Government of Angora to the Soviet Republic. The ambassador was a rather short, stocky, matter-of-factlooking Turk, but when he talked Turkey, his dull brown eyes flamed. He talked as I have heard no one talk since those early days of the Russian Revolution, when the halls of Petrograd were swarming with men who had caught fire in a cause. When he talked, and he seized the opportunity of every conversational lull, it was always of New Turkey. I was Later, in Turkey, I was to meet many young Turks with that same fire in their eyes, that same ardor on their tongues, and some older ones. to find them in no less a place than the palace of Dolmabagché, where an unhappy crown prince quite frankly acknowledged that the government within the Sublime Port is but a straw man without power save as it comes from the nationalist seat at Angora, and that the hope of his country lies there. My path of entry into Constantinople was not that which brought the American tourists to the Golden Horn. It was one which has been little traveled in these years of war, blockade, and revolution. I came across the Black Sea from Odessa, seaport of that country, which, if the plans of certain once famous statesmen had been realized, would to-day be ruling the sultan's capital. Constantinople, seen against the background of hungry Russia, was not the same city the tourists saw. Except for a couple of grain ships unloading corn for the Volga famine regions, a shabby Greek trader The naval launch that carried me up the Bosporus, past the jagged walls and stone towers of the ancient Greek and Turkish forts, past bluetopped minarets of marble whiteness, cut through the shadow of many an alien craft. Judging by the shipping, Turkey has been almost as crippled in the matter of commerce as her proud neighbor, but there was no dearth of fighting seamen upon her waters. A British cruiser and some destroyers, two French battle-ships, big, ponderous, heavy-laden, a Greek man-of-war, more and more of them-the names told the stories of the far seas from which they had come. Little fishingboats, sails swelling in the fresh afternoon breeze, snuggled close together, as if they needed friendly touch in this great company of foreign giants. Along the shores stood a palace here, a villa there. Beyond lay an ancient cemetery, with headstones like tipsy asparagus stalks growing under the wind-worn cypress-trees, black-green against the afternoon sky. Shabby, unpainted, dilapidated, but still beautiful, this Constantinople of 1922, with marks of sixteen years of war and countless fires cut like deep wrinkles in an old crone's face. The Turk has a natural tendency to build, then leave his house to the elements to do what they will with it. When they have done their worst, he builds again. During those years of fighting there has been neither time nor money for building or even for furbishing. |