Turks

“ As an Englishman, policy obliges me to wish success to the Turks; for I have already proved to you, that our lucrative trade to the Levant can never be carried on so much to our advantage as whilst Turkey remains in the hands of its present possessors; and, as a Philanthrope, I feel the utmost detestation of the ambitious combination entered into by the Emperor and the Empress, to extirpate the Turks, merely because Nature has been bountiful to their soil, and because their country promised an easy conquest. ”

“ I was of military age and Turkey was under blockade. When I had left Constantinople a few years after the Turkish revolution, the whole country was exhilarated, filled with joy, with ambition and with hope. Freedom and emancipation from an autocratic domination had been obtained. Nothing was to prevent the normal advance of Turkey and the Turks along the road to progress. We were at last to obtain full recognition as a civilized nation. We were at last to receive equal treatment from the other European nations. ”

“ But in a wider and deeper sense the Turks owed their misfortunes to themselves--to their customs and their creed. Success in war depends ultimately on the brain-power of the chief leaders and organisers; and that source of strength has long ago been dried up in Turkey by adhesion to a sterilising creed and cramping traditions. ”

“ Thus the life of this strange people, the Turks, goes on{108}{107} from day to day, leisurely business transacted with all dignity of inherent idleness, endless gossip under the vines and awnings of small cafés, talk which begins nowhere and arrives nowhere. Squalor, dirt, picturesque decay, and over all the sense that a migratory race has settled here for a while, is not disposed to move until turned out, and has just put up a leader or two with sufficient enterprise to make others build him a place of worship to glorify himself above his fellows. ”

“ The occupations of the Turks are various, for being lords of the land they and they alone, in most parts of the country, occupy the posts of Government. Amongst them, we may first rank the independent beys and effendis—nobles of the land, wealthy from inheritance, and most generally possessed of extensive gardens and plantations, these are the aristocracy—they have no cares as to how they shall live—no thought as to their sustenance—their mansions are capacious—their studs splendid—their repasts sumptuous—their harems filled with the choicest flowers of Georgia and Circassia. ”

“ Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. ”

“ The slogan “Turkey for the Turks” invaded general business and gave such a tremendous impetus to the Turks that it was a very great surprise to me—and a very gratifying one—to witness at my return the extent to which my people have succeeded in obtaining a foothold in the business life of the country. The great majority of the Turks are now in business, men and women. In all the shops and offices of Stamboul, in quite a few stores and offices of Pera and Galata you see Turkish girls at work behind counters or at desks, some working on big ledgers, others pounding on typewriters. ”

“ For the fifth, the Turks are an exceedingly sensual race, by nature and education, as I have shown. The very religion that should help to make them pure, helps to make them vile. Lust leads them, and they follow; nature prompts, and their religion requires it. I am truly ashamed to tell it, but even when they go to their mosques to worship, they manifest their sensuality. Not only the relations of male and female are very rank, but between male and male they are worse; between the old Turks and young Turks, the very boys, the relations are too disgusting to describe. ”

“ Nursery tales of the ferocity of the Turks recurred to a mind which the consciousness of doing wrong made susceptible to fear. We were on our way to steal into a mosque, the door of which was strictly closed against us. We were dressed in Turkish clothes, and Christian women were forbidden under a heavy penalty to dress as Turks, except in the company of Turkish women. We were all Greeks, and the Turks had been our hereditary enemies since 1453. ”

“ The Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Persians and others had broken away and set up their own governments. It was time for the Turks to protect what was left by adopting the same nationalist policy.
After their first success against the Sultan the Young Turks began to behave foolishly. They preached ‘Turkish brotherhood’; meaning no more than to rally together all men of Turkish blood. Turkey should be the absolute mistress of a subject empire in the modern French style; not merely the chief state of a religious Empire only bound together by the Arabic language and the Koran. ”

“ The position of Turkey is certainly an anomaly. It is an Asiatic power planted in Europe. It is a Mohammedan power ruling over millions of Christians. It is a government of Turks—that is of Tartars—over men of a better race as well as a purer religion. It is a government of a minority over a majority. The Mohammedans, the ruling caste, are only about one-quarter of the population of European Turkey—some estimates make it much less, but where there is no accurate census, it must be a matter of conjecture. ”

“ The real ‘Turkey’ is Turkestan, and the real Turks are the Turcomans. The Osmanlis are the least typical Turks surviving. Only a very small proportion of them have any strain of Turkish blood, and this is diluted till it is rarely perceptible in their physiognomy: and if environment rather than blood is to be held responsible for racial features, it can only be said that the territory occupied by the Osmanlis is as unlike the homeland of the true Turks as it can well be, and is quite unsuited to typically Turkish life and manners. ”

“ The fact that the Turks have not entered into business until comparatively recently is not at all due to laziness or indolence. It is rather due to two distinct causes which must be mentioned here to render full justice to the Turkish race. The first is a moral cause. The religion, the education and the Asiatic origin of the Turks have led them to look upon life more like a road that should be used to reach spiritual attainments than like an opportunity to obtain material gains. ”

“ Which of the generations would you prefer?
“If the Turk ever asks our advice, I sincerely hope no ‘counsels from Europe’ will ever replace the artistic traditions of the East.... Europeanised Turks are not the ‘best’ Turks.
“You have already, alas, in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, that cheap, ‘made in Germany’ monstrosity of a fountain, which the once-mighty Emperor William bequeathed to you as the ‘souvenir’ of a visit to ‘his brother,’ Abdul Hamid! Why has war left it untouched?” ”

“ For example, there can be no doubt that a Bulgarian would rather be governed by the Moslem Turk than by the Greek. And amid all these races, more numerous than any of them taken singly, are the ruling Turks, who own the fee simple of the land by the best of titles, conquest. They are the strong race whose bearing is in strong contrast to the servility of some of the races in their midst. They are the masterly people fit to rule the others; for whatever peace fanatics may say, only people ready to fight bravely in defence of their possessions are fit to own possessions. ”

“ The Turks are a very temperate people.
A Turkish gentleman declared that the young men of Constantinople were being led into dissipation because they thought it was “progress”; that fast foreigners had introduced bad habits into the country, including whisky and brandy drinking, and many young Turks had followed their example. The saloons and beer gardens, he said, were intended for, and were generally patronized by, the foreign population—the French, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and others—and several liquor stores had been established to supply them. ”

“ There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. ”

“ The outside population take no interest. They are glad to be let [57] alone. The business community consists of Armenians, Greeks and Jews, with a few Turks. It would not be accurate to say that all Turks are in office, but it is actually true that all the offices are filled by Turks, and as there are not enough offices to go round, those who are left out and compelled to get their living without the aid of the government, are forever conspiring against the Sultan or the grand vizier. ”

“ The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. ”

“ In speaking of the Turks it is necessary to carry two distinct types in mind. The pure Tatar vagrant, true to his native indolence, which unfits him for sedentary occupation, is in the minority. The mass of the Turkish population consists of a mixed element in which the racial strain of given localities persists along with characteristics imparted by fusion with Turki conquerors. This mingling is indicated further by the spirit which moves this people in the performance of their daily tasks. Its members are recruited among the plodding, gentle-mannered and kind-hearted peasants of the land. ”

“ Their unity among themselves, and their distinctively different character from that of the other Turks of Asia Minor, becomes, during the first sixty years of the fourteenth century, so marked that Europe is forced to recognize them as a nation. Being more in the presence of Europe than the other groups of Asia Minor, the Europeans begin to call them simply Turks, and to take them as representing all the Turks of Anatolia. ”

“ To obtain the sympathy and the moral support of certain nations which, like America, are imbued with the spirit of fair play, some of their women write sweet articles where the keynote is the lovableness of the Turks individually, their innocence, their dearness and their romanticism cunningly interwoven with stories—supposed to be personal experiences—which emphasize in descriptions if not in words, the ignorance of the Turks, their administrative or business incapacity, how they still practise slavery and polygamy, and how they commit political murders and atrocities. ”

“ Türklük, by which strangers understand the above-named fault, is often used by the Turks themselves as a mark of plainness, simplicity, and uprightness. The lights and shades of Türklük have been at all times observable and discoursed on, whenever parallels are drawn between the character of the Turks and of other nations, especially the Persians. People praise the acuteness, the refined manners of the latter; but still, he who wants to find a faithful servant, an attached soldier, or an upright man, will always give the preference to the Turks. ”

“ They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place. ”

“ The Turkish element in the Balkan peninsula can be got rid of only by exterminating it; that is, by treating the Turks more ferociously than they treated the native populations at the time of the conquest. We ought not to forget, at the same time, that the Turks, though far inferior in numbers to the other races, are nevertheless able to reckon upon the support of millions of Mo­ham­me­dan Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Circassians, and Nogai Tartars. ”

“ All members of my mother's family have a practical business-like instinct, a quality which is so conspicuously lacking in those Turks who have no strain of foreign blood. I am convinced that there is some European blood in the veins of my mother's ancestors. She belongs to a family of soldiers who for generations were charged by the Ottoman Sultans with the defence of the provinces and the frontiers of Bosnia and Herzegovina In those days the Turks used to make slaves of their captives in war, just as their enemies used to carry Turks into permanent captivity when invading their territory. ”