The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-12-28
NOTED AT coxsrANTNoP1B.

The Sultan Government Becoming
 More and More Impossible.
 At Constantinople we made our first
 acquaintance with the Turk, usually
 called ''the unspeakable." He is slow, procrastinating, and as a government
 disinclined to move, and all this is
 perfectly natural His religion for
 bids progress. It does not recognize
 the right of man as man upon which
 al lprogress rests. Besides, it is fatal
 istic; and things can happen in Gods
 way regardless of hurry or railways
 or modern facilities. Still more, every
 Turkish official is surrounded by spice
 eager to earn their pay by reporting
 wrongdoings, and any new departure 1 Is easily represented as criminal
 It took us over an hour to get ! through the custom house. This
 was partly due to exceptional! circum- 1 stances. A few weeks ago, when a bomb was thrown at the Sultan, olle of the accused was found to be an Armenian just come from America, Soon after another American Ar menian stabbed a merchant in the
 city for refusing money to a revolu-
 tionary fund. The result was that Americans were feared as men of dy-
 namite, and our baggage was searched
 to the bottom. Two or three books
 we handed over to a special censor
 To fogr
 carefully gone through, and her
 gummed-in pictures of William Tell and Augustus with cupids holding him
 by the legs were severely scanned. The
 Turks are afrain of books as well as of bombs, for in a sense they do the same work. I was told of one book on me chanics rejected because it spoke of something making "5O revolutions in a minute" and of chemistry cut-out because H. o. in it was regarded as 'Hamio II is no good.
 Knowledge and liberty go together and the Sultan is the deadly foe of liberty. He has absorbed in himself the power of the Cabinet. His Minis ters are only his clerks and messen- gers. All new laws are his decrees so it is no wonder that 1t takes two or three years for business to reach de- cision. He lives in palace sur rounded by walls and guards, with a mosque within the grounds. He re- fuses to go into old Stamboul even once a year for worship as his pred- eccessors did. He has a guard about him by night which is paid $sS0 in gold every morning. In fact, it is said the only men in the empire who are promptly and fully paid are the officials near the throne in the capital. Since the last bomb throwing the sui- tan is being wa"ed up more than be- fore, and the public will see him no more going to his mosque on Friday How long Turkey can stand is a ques- tion; fall it must some time, for it is an impossible system in the twentieth century. have been told that Mace donia is ripe for separation, and that within 10 years it is expected to be- come part of Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, according to the people in diff ferent sections of it. A ruler that will not allow telephone in his dominions nor code for telegrams, who has in his capital English. French, German and Austrian post officers, because peo- pie do not trust the government off, ficers, whose mother was an Armenian and yet who murders Armenians till he has made all that survive his deadly foes, who cannot allow guns to be fired announcing fires till a telegram is sent to the police to explain what the shots signify, who has his brother, heir to the throne, kept 8 prisoner in a palace beside his own, and who lives l in terror and suspicion, opposing, like | a Mosle1n pope, all new light and life | and breeding corruption. and venality | in all about him-such ruler seems | H. M. Scott, in Chi l cago Advance.