The Washington herald., 1915-01-31

Although he swept down from the cen
ter OF Asia seven centuries ago he still
is only camping out and foraging in the
land he conquered. He neither performs
/ the labor nor controls the trade of Tur-
key. For this martial nomad tolls not.
neither does he spin. DisdaininG any
/ vest is the taxation he reaps where others
SOW. The banks, the shops. the rail-
roads are in the hands Of the Greeks. the
Armenians. the Jews, and foreigners
from European countries.
Hardly a quarter of the 3o.OOO,OOO or 3d.
OOO.0O0 subjects which the Sultan claims.
but never has troubled himself to count
are Turks, and they are not reproducing
as fast as the subject races. The Greeks
insist that already they largely outnum-
Der them. but no one quite believes the
made up Of Syrians. Arabs. Armenians,
Jews. and most extraordinary ethnicaI
medley.
When the Young Turks brought in a
parliament in 1905. its members swarmed
( into the lobby. speaking no less than
twenty languages. The problem had TO
be met if a modern Tower OF Babel was
to be averted. and Turkish was adopted
as the parliamentary speech.
While the Sultan pretends to the su-
preme headship of the Moslem church
throughout the world. and has called
down upon the allies a holy war" he
has only small fraction Of Islam world
under his sovereignty. Even Russia has
a larger Mahometan population than Tur-
key.
Why the Sick Man Is Sick.
The chronic and incurable Ailment of
the Turk is that there really is not and
never has been Turkish nation. Tur-
key is only a stretch of the imagination
on the part OF politicians and geograph-
ers Damascus, for example, scoTns to
be called a Turkish city, its people, who
are Syrians by race and Arak by culture,
taking pride in the purity of their Arabic
speech. For 90 miles and more to the
north there is hardly Turkish COM
munity. and none whatever to the south.
Virtually the only Turks ever seen in
Damascus are the officials of the carpet
bag kind. and when they come fresh
from ConstantinOple they cannot make
themselves understood by the man in the
street.
that unites the Syrians and their Tartar
rulers. who can make no contribution to
the Syrian and ARABIC civilization. The
government does nothing but tax the
people and retard their prosperity and
development. The empire provides no
schools. and even its postal service is so
incompetent that Austria, Germany,
France and Great Britain have had to
establish a system for the benefit of their
trade and their citizens. At the ports
and at some of the inland towns these
foreign postoffices do all the foreign mail
business. A letter or a money order sent
to Beirut, Malta, Jaffa or Jerusalem
before the war would not have been en-
trusted to the Turkish postal service by
the United States. but would have been
transferred to the Austrian or German
postoffice for delivery.
Nor does the Sultan give the people
an adequate circulating medium. While
travelling through Syria and Palestine
the only Turkish money / commonly saw
was the much-battered copper piastre
and silver mejidi. At that point the ma
tive money give out and French gold is
reckoning in terms of francs and Ma
poleons. Thus / was told by ticket
teker on a train. who had returned from
America fluent in the use of American
slang, Il made eighteen bones a week
I'm the States and here I get only seven
Maps a month"
1t is amusingly confusing TO the Amer
lean traveller when he finds himself
standing in an Austrian postoffice on
Turkish soil. translating the price Of a
supply of postage stamps first from the
crowns and hellers Of Austria into the
francs and centimes of French money
and finally into the dollars and cents
of his own understanding.
The Turk is not only incapable OF
doing anything for his more advsnGei
people, but through blind suspicion
of everything modern, he is capable
of stupidity interfering with any ef-
fort at progress. He was most re-
luctant and slow to permit Damascus,
a city of some 100000 people, to have
electric lights As for the telephone,
he never has relented in his stub
born opposition to that inveatiol of
the infideL II he has yielded since
the revolution, it is only so far as to
put it in the police stations, where ii
might aid him in expressing the peo-
pie. But he continues to forbid a
private telephone system in Damascus,
Beirut or Jerusalem. / was informed,
indeed that there was not an ex-
change in the Turkish empire.
The Eye of the East.
Under a government so benighted,
we have an empire with an area of
1000, 900 square miles with less rail-
way mileage than the little State of
Massachusetts, or the little kingdom
Of Belgium. In that small Turkish
system, Damascus Is the great center,
as II was the great center Of trans
portation through the thousands of
years when the camel was the loco
motive.
The city was acclaimed 'the eye of the
East" when history was in its youth and
nature herself has made II the gateway
to the West and to the Mediterranean
From its very back door the desert
stretches away to the Euphrates and the
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