Will the Sick Man of Europe Recover?

Each time that I have approached Constantinople from the Marmora Sea and have watched that glorious and fascinating panorama—Seraglio Point, St. Sophia, Stamboul, the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge, the heights of Pera, Dolmabagtche, Yildiz—slowly unfold, revealing new beauties, new mysteries, with each revolution of the steamer’s screw, I have declared that in all the world there is no city so lovely as this capital of the Caliphs. Yet, beautiful though Constantinople is, it combines the moral squalor of Southern Europe with the physical squalor of the Orient to a greater degree than any city in the Levant. Though it has assumed the outward appearance of a well-organized and fairly well administered municipality since its occupation by the Allies, one has but to scratch this thin veneer to discover that the filth and vice and corruption and misgovernment which characterized it under Ottoman rule still remain. Barring a few municipal improvements which were made in the European quarter of Pera and in the fashionable residential districts between Dolmabagtche and Yildiz, the Turkish capital has scarcely a bowing acquaintance with modern sanitation, the windows of some of the finest residences in Stamboul looking out on open sewers down which refuse of every description floats slowly to the sea or takes lodgment on the banks, these masses of decaying matter attracting great swarms of pestilence-breeding flies. The streets are thronged with women whose virtue is as easy as an old shoe, attracted by the presence of the armies as vultures are attracted by the smell of carrion. Saloons, brothels, dives and gambling hells run wide open and virtually unrestricted, and as a consequence venereal diseases abound, though the British military authorities, in order to protect their own men, have put the more notorious resorts “out of bounds” and, in order to provide more wholesome recreations for the troops, have opened amusement parks called “military gardens.” In spite of the British, French, Italian and Turkish military police who are on duty in the streets, stabbing affrays, shootings and robberies are so common that they provoke but little comment. Petty thievery is universal. Hats, coats, canes, umbrellas disappear from beside one’s chair in hotels and restaurants. The Pera Palace Hotel has notices posted in its corridors warning the guests that it is no longer safe to place their shoes outside their doors to be polished. The streets, always wretchedly paved, have been ground to pieces by the unending procession of motor-lorries, and, as they are never by any chance repaired, the first rain transforms them into a series of hog-wallows. The most populous districts of Pera, of Galata, and of Stamboul are now disfigured by great areas of fire-blackened ruins—reminders of the several terrible conflagrations from which the Turkish capital has suffered in recent years. “Should the United States decide to accept the mandate for Constantinople,” a resident remarked to me, “these burned districts would give her an opportunity to start rebuilding the city on modern sanitary lines” and, he might have added, at American expense.

The prices of necessities are fantastic and of luxuries fabulous. The cost of everything has advanced from 200 to 1,200 per cent. The price of a meal is no longer reckoned in piastres but in Turkish pounds, though this is not as startling as it sounds, for the Turkish lira has dropped to about a quarter of its normal value. Quite a modest dinner for two at such places as Tokatlian’s, the Pera Palace Hotel, or the Pera Gardens, costs the equivalent of from fifteen to twenty dollars. Everything else is in proportion. From the “Little Club” in Pera to the Galata Bridge is about a seven minutes’ drive by carriage. In the old days the standard tariff for the trip was twenty-five cents. Now the cabmen refuse to turn a wheel for less than two dollars.

Speaking of money, the chief occupation of the traveler in the Balkans is exchanging the currency of one country for that of another: lira into dinars, dinars into drachmæ, drachmæ into piastres, piastres into leva, leva into lei, lei into roubles (though no one ever exchanges his money for roubles if he can possibly help it), roubles into kronen, and kronen into lire again. The idea is to leave each country with as little as possible of that country’s currency in your possession. It is like playing that card game in which you are penalized for every heart you have left in your hand.

“But how is the Sick Man?” I hear you ask.

He is doing very nicely, thank you. In fact, he appears to be steadily improving. There was a time, shortly after the Armistice, when it seemed certain that he would have to submit to an operation, which he probably would not have survived, but the surgeons disagreed as to the method of operating and now it looks as though he would get well in spite of them. He has a chill every time they hold a consultation, of course, but he will probably escape the operation altogether, though he may have to take some extremely unpleasant medicine and be kept on a diet for several years to come. He has remarkable recuperative powers, you know, and his friends expect to see him up and about before long.

That may sound flippant, as it is, but it sums up in a single paragraph the extraordinary political situation which exists in Turkey to-day. Little more than a year ago Turkey surrendered in defeat, her resources exhausted, her armies destroyed or scattered. If anything in the world seemed certain at that time it was that the redhanded nation, whose very name has for centuries been a synonym for cruelty and oppression, would disappear from the map of Europe, if not from the map of the world, at the behest of an outraged civilization. The Turkish Government committed the most outrageous crime of the entire war when it organized the systematic extermination of the Armenians. Its former Minister of War, Enver Pasha, has been quoted as cynically remarking, “If there are no more Armenians there can be no Armenian question.” A people capable of such barbarity ought no longer be permitted to sully Europe with their presence: they ought to be driven back into those savage Anatolian regions whence they came and kept there, just as those suffering from a less objectionable form of leprosy are confined on Molokai. But the fervor of a year ago for expelling the Turks from Europe is rapidly dying down. In the spring of 1919 Turkey could have been partitioned by the Allies with comparatively little friction. No one expected it more than Turkey herself. Whenever she heard a step on the floor, a knock at the door, she keyed herself for the ordeal of the anesthetic and the operating table. But the ancient jealousies and rivalries of the Entente nations, which had been forgotten during the war, returned with peace and now it looks as though, as a result of these nations’ distrust and suspicion of each other, the Turks would win back by diplomacy what they lost in battle. How History repeats itself! The Turks have often been unlucky in war and then had a return of luck at the peace table. It was so after the Russo-Turkish War, when the Congress of Berlin tore up the Treaty of San Stefano. It was so to a lesser extent after the Balkan wars, when the interference of the European Concert enabled Turkey to recover Adrianople and a portion of the Thracian territory which she had lost to Bulgaria. And now it looks as though she were once again to escape the punishment she so richly merits. If she does, then History will chronicle few more shameful miscarriages of justice.

If the people of the United States could know for a surety of the avarice, the selfishness, the cynicism which have marked every step of the negotiations relative to the settlement of the Near Eastern Question, if they were aware of the chicanery and the deceit and the low cunning practised by the European diplomatists, I am convinced that there would be an irresistible demand that we withdraw instantly from participation in the affairs of Southeastern Europe and of Western Asia. Why not look the facts in the face? Why not admit that these affairs are, after all, none of our concern, and that, by every one save the Turks and the Armenians, our attempted dictation is resented. In the language of the frontier, we have butted into a game in which we are not wanted. It is no game for up-lifters or amateurs. England, France, Italy and Greece are not in this game to bring order out of chaos but to establish “spheres of influence.” They are not thinking about self-determination and the rights of little peoples and making the world safe for Democracy; they are thinking in terms of future commercial and territorial advantage. They are playing for the richest stakes in the history of the world: for the control of the Bosphorus and the Bagdad Railway—for whoever controls them controls the trade routes to India, Persia, and the vast, untouched regions of Transcaspia; the commercial domination of Western Asia, and the overlordship of that city which stands at the crossroads of the Eastern World and its political capital of Islam.