CHAPTER XV

_AFTER THE REVOLUTION_

The victory had been won; the Young Turkey party was triumphant; the Ottoman people had gained their liberty. There was complete individual liberty and liberty of the press; there were no more spies, no more domiciliary visits, no more oppression. In short, the Turks, who for a generation had been groaning under the crudest of Oriental despotisms, in one day became as free as the people of England, indeed in some respects considerably freer than them. Peace came of a sudden to this troubled land which had for so long been an inferno of implacable racial hatreds, all men went about in security, and the peasants were able to sow their fields knowing that they themselves would be the reapers. This was not as other revolutions; for though for a time there was no law in the land and no administration, there was no anarchy, there were no cruel reprisals, there were no excesses; the conduct of the entire population was admirable.

These revolutionaries, unlike those in some other lands, did not hasten, so soon as they had freed themselves of one despotism, to cast upon the country the still more galling chains of democratic tyranny. The people who made this revolution were the educated men in Turkey, all that was best in the country; and thus from the beginning this had been the most conservative of revolutions. There was nothing approaching to socialism or anarchism in this movement. The Young Turks, as I have already explained, have no theories about the reconstruction of society; they have no schemes for the benefiting of one class by the spoliation of another; they do not believe that one man is as good as another, or that manhood suffrage will bring the millennium. Like the English revolution of 1688, this one came from above and not from below. That the ignorant masses did not usurp the direction of the movement, and by discrediting it prepare the way for the restoration of the despotic power, was largely due to the fact that Turkey, fortunately for herself, has had her revolution before she has arrived at that stage of economic and industrial development when what we term the working-classes think out political and social theories or, rather, accept the views of the mischievous demagogues who mislead them. There is no class hatred in Turkey; there are no large manufacturing industries to produce hordes of discontented people in the big cities, and, so far, there are no agrarian questions to trouble the minds of the simple and pious Turkish peasantry.

Of the seventy thousand exiles who returned to Turkey from Europe and America after the proclamation of the Constitution there were of course some who had mixed with Russian anarchists, with internationalists and other political extremists, and had absorbed their theories; but these are in a small minority and exercise no appreciable influence. The same may be said of a certain set of well-to-do exiles who for years were idle Paris _flaneurs_, lost some of their Ottoman virtues, became poor patriots, and have now returned as _dilettante_ politicians, some of them to join the party which advocates a thorough-going home rule all round for the various races of Turkey—a programme detestable to the more earnest Young Turks, who realise that such a policy would lead to the certain disintegration of the Empire.

But it is of the attitude of the people themselves and not of the politicians that I wish to speak in this chapter. When the Ottomans of all races and creeds suddenly found themselves free they became filled with an exceeding joy, a new sentiment of brotherhood, and a profound gratitude to the saviours of the country, the Committee of Union and Progress, that took the practical form of implicit obedience to the Committee’s mandates, so that it had little difficulty in preserving order. All over the country there were great demonstrations and rejoicings of enthusiastic and good-natured crowds, that touched foreign spectators of these scenes and compelled the sympathy even of the cynically inclined. In the streets and _cafés_ and tramcars of the capital, wherein men had been wont to meet in silence, each suspecting the other, strangers, united by a common joy, now spoke to each other freely and in kindly fashion. It was a reign of universal amity, and it seemed as if all that is best in human nature had come to the top. European witnesses have described the wonderful fraternisations of men of all races and creeds: how Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Jews harangued sympathetic crowds in the streets of the capital, preaching peace and good will among men; how even in Beyrout, notorious for the massacres of Christians under the late _régime_, Christian priests and turbanned _mollahs_ embraced publicly before fraternising mobs of Moslems and Armenians; how in the same city the Turkish commander with his officers and troops attended a service in the Armenian church to lament over the massacres of their Christian fellow-countrymen; and how, with the same object, crowds of Moslems in Stamboul went to the Armenian cemetery to pray and place flowers upon the graves of those who had been slaughtered by the orders of the Palace. It was the same in Jerusalem, where the various Christian sects—hitherto kept from flying at each other’s throats by the bayonets of the Moslem soldiery—now made friends and joined in processions with Mussulmans and Jews.

In Salonica, the head-quarters of the revolution, there were scenes of intense national rejoicing that astonished European observers. The Bulgarian, Greek, and other leaders of bands, the Albanian brigand chiefs, and all their followings of ferocious outlaws of the hills, on whose heads there had been a price for years, men of different races who since boyhood had been burning each other’s villages and killing each other’s women, flocked into the town to submit to the Committee, to be reconciled to one another, and to become the friends of the Moslem Turks. Sandansky himself, the king of the mountains, the most formidable of the Bulgarian leaders of bands, came in, harangued the crowds on liberty, fraternity, and justice, and was received with the greatest enthusiasm. All these fighting men, who had spread terror through Macedonia and Albania, clad in the picturesque dress of Europe’s wildest and least known regions, forgot civil war and blood feuds, fraternised with each other and with the Turkish soldiery, marched down the streets roaring the songs of liberty, hobnobbed together over cups of coffee, and sometimes _mastic_ and _raki_, in the _cafés_, embraced each other, and swore to be brothers.

I was in Salonica four months after Turkey had won her freedom, and the national jubilation had not yet subsided; it was everywhere exultation and good-fellowship. Here, in this city of many races, I found myself surrounded by a refreshing atmosphere of joyous delight in the new-found liberty. From the window of my hotel I looked out upon the busy quay and the blue sea that stretched to the snows of Olympus. Along this quay passes most of the life of the town, and at frequent intervals something happened in front of me to remind me of the revolution and of the keenness of the people. Now it was a procession of Christians and Mussulmans fraternising and singing patriotic songs on their way to the railway station to cheer a newly elected Deputy who was starting for Constantinople; now it was a body of troops of the Macedonian army marching through crowds which hailed them as their liberators; now a battalion paraded on the quay to be exhorted by some general before embarking for Constantinople, for at that time the Young Turks were despatching more of their faithful troops to the capital, determined to be in readiness should the forces of reaction reassert themselves; now it was the return from over the water of some exile of despotism to the friends and relatives who had not seen him for years. Thus one morning I saw a flag-decorated tender come off from a newly arrived steamer and land on the stage in front of me the Albanian General, Mehmed Pasha, just freed from a long exile in Baghdad; he was welcomed with shouts and clapping of hands by the large crowd of Albanians and others who had come to escort him to his house.

There were most affecting sights, too, to be seen in those early days of liberty. When it was decreed that political prisoners should be liberated, the gates of the prisons were thrown open, and out poured, in their thousands, the captives of the Despotism, to be received by crowds of deeply moved sympathisers. Many of these unfortunate men had been confined for years in cells but twelve feet square, and came out into fresh air and sunshine dazed and weak in mind, like the prisoner of the Bastille in Dickens’ famous story, to be led home by relatives and friends. Here one would see outside the prison door a husband and wife greet each other with tears of joy after years of separation, and here some poor wretch, with spirit long since tortured out of him, weeping miserably as he wandered to and fro because no dear ones had come to meet him, and he realised that they had died while he was in captivity.

It was pleasant to observe the confidence and pride of the population in the Young Turk leaders, who had sacrificed so much for liberty and justice. The patriotism of the people of Salonica was then being displayed in various ways. Large sums were being collected to supply comforts to the troops who throughout the winter were to guard the northern frontier against any attack on the part of Turkey’s enemies, and a movement had also been started in the town, which, if it spreads far enough, may relieve the Government of some of its embarrassments. Officers of the garrison and civil servants of all grades, reading of the depleted treasury and the heavy burden of the floating debt, were abandoning their claims to their arrears of pay, because, as they said, their country needed the money. Deputies, also, were refusing to accept their travelling allowances.

For one who knew Turkey under the old _régime_ it was very interesting, in Constantinople, to observe the outward signs of the great change which had come to the country, and to note the attitude of a population which found itself suddenly in the enjoyment of the widest liberty. In most countries, after such a revolution, the people would have been intoxicated with their new freedom; the forces of disorder would have been let loose; there would have been, for a while, a condition approaching anarchy. But Constantinople is not like other European capitals, and it took its revolution in a sensible fashion. All the old restrictions had been swept away; but liberty had not broken into license. Though there was no longer a censorship of printed matter, the Turkish press observed a dignified moderation in its tone. For the first time the comic papers were free to publish political caricatures in which the highest personages were represented; but if one might judge from such as were exhibited in the windows of the newspaper shops, there was nothing offensive in these somewhat crude pictures. Large crowds attended political meetings in the capital; but there was no disturbance of the peace and there was no need for the presence of the police or the troops, save when the Greeks, who are never happy unless they have some real or imaginary grievance to make a noise about, made demonstrations during the elections. People now enjoyed the right to form themselves into associations, but one heard of no anarchical societies; and apparently the first result of this new privilege was that the Turkish temperance reformers availed themselves of it to establish a total abstinence league in Cæsarea.

But, as might be expected, the interregnum between the withdrawal of the authority of the old _régime_ with its severe code and its armies of spies, and the reorganisation of the police and other departments by the Young Turks was taken advantage of to some extent by the ignorant and lawless. At the beginning of the revolution all prisoners, including the criminals, were released from the gaols—probably because it was impossible in many cases to ascertain whether the offence for which a man had been confined was a political one or otherwise. The restrictions on the sale and carrying of fire-arms were also removed, with the result that revolvers in tens of thousands poured into the city and were at once bought up. A large proportion of the population carried revolvers and also let them off; men practised with them in the streets; accidents were frequent; and in some quarters of the city, especially in the poorer Greek quarters, it was not unusual to hear a regular fusillade going on at night, generally in honour of something or other, or to spread the news that a house was on fire. Robbery with violence in the streets certainly increased after the revolution. But, notwithstanding all this, it could not be fairly said that Constantinople was a dangerous place to walk about in at any hour; and indeed, when it is remembered what a lot of cosmopolitan blackguardism there is in that city of over a million inhabitants, it is astonishing that there was so large a measure of security for life and property.

It was natural, too, that Turks of the poorer and more ignorant class should be under the impression that this new constitutional liberty meant that each man was free to do what he liked—a common error which before long was eradicated from the minds of this naturally law-abiding people by the Young Turk administration. Thus many thought that the Constitution wiped out the liability to pay any private debts incurred before the revolution. In the country, peasants came to the conclusion that they would no longer be called upon to pay taxes; in the towns the contrabandists sold their smuggled tobacco openly; and in Constantinople itself the popular conception of liberty produced some amusing results. The firewood sellers were to be seen calmly chopping up their logs in the middle of a busy thoroughfare; pavements were often blocked with the wares of the hawkers; and others in like manner carried on their avocations in public; so that the narrow, crowded streets and the Galata Bridge, difficult enough to traverse in the days of the old régime, became almost impassable. This sums up the inconveniences of the interregnum; they were wonderfully few and trifling when one bears in mind what a revolution this had been.

It was, of course, difficult for the Young Turks to reorganise the police and carry out administrative reforms until Parliament met; for the provisionary Ministry was naturally disinclined to accept much responsibility. But in the meanwhile, though there was a little license in small matters, the people were made to understand clearly that the Committee would stand no nonsense. This was proved at the time of the coaling strike in Galata not long after the proclamation of the Constitution. The men, having struck once and obtained the concession of their demands, came to the conclusion that under the new Constitution they were free to extort what they pleased and terrorise the population; so they struck again for a prohibitive rate of wage which would have closed the port to commerce. It was a critical time: the Young Turks were on their trial; their movement had been represented by their enemies as anarchical; their cause would be lost were they to fail to preserve order among the populace. It must be remembered that this was not only the question of a strike, but of probable rioting of so serious a nature that it might have caused European intervention; for these labourers who coal the ships at Galata belong to that rabble of Kurds and other Mussulmans of the lowest class which is only too ready, on a hint from the Palace, to set about massacring Armenians and other Christians.

It therefore behooved the Young Turks to prove that they could rule men, and they did so. Two young officers rode boldly, unescorted, into the middle of a dangerous crowd of the strikers, and by their firm attitude compelled the men to listen to them. First they tried persuasion, and pointed out to the strikers that by their action they were prejudicing the cause of freedom which they had so loudly acclaimed but a few days before. But the men would not be persuaded and refused to go back to their work. Then the two officers changed their attitude. One, drawing his revolver, reminded the men that under the old _régime_ the soldiers would have been sent to throw them into the water or cast them into prison! “And as you are conducting yourselves as friends of the old _régime_, so shall you be treated,” he exclaimed. “I will come down here to-morrow and ask you to return at once to your work. I will with my own hand shoot down the first man who refuses to do so, and the rest of you will be swept into the sea or into prison.” The next morning the two officers rode to the quay followed by a body of cavalry. The strikers knew that what had been said was meant, and quietly went off to work, and there has been no trouble since with this dangerous element of the population.

Indeed, the Committee, by its firmness and justice, made itself loved of the people, who at last came to obey its orders without question. Thus, when the Committee enjoined the strict boycott of Austrian trade, while at the same time forbidding the populace to molest or insult Austrian subjects, a wonderful thing happened. The Austrians were able to go about the streets in perfect safety; and the Austrian shops remained open, but no one would buy of them, however cheaply they offered their goods. The rough and ignorant Kurds who do the coaling and also earn their living as lightermen and as porters in Galata, and the poor Jews who do the same work in Salonica, to a man enforced the boycott, though it meant for them a great falling off in their small wages, and short commons for their families. Thus no Constantinople boatman would take a passenger off to an Austrian steamer, or carry him on shore from it when he reached his destination. These steamers had to use their own launches for the embarkation and disembarkation of passengers; and the person who had sailed under this tabooed flag sometimes found himself in a sorry plight even after he had been landed on a Turkish quay, no porter being willing to carry his baggage. But in February last, so soon as the Governments of Turkey and Austria had arranged their differences, the Committee of Union and Progress gave the word that the boycott should cease; and cease it did within an hour of this order: the boatmen, porters, lightermen, and dock labourers in every port in Turkey coming out as one man to work again for the Austrians.

In the cities and in the countryside all seemed to be going well with the cause of the Young Turks; but foreigners who observed this harmonious opening of the new _régime_ and this extraordinary fraternisation of men of different races and creeds hitherto irreconcilable asked themselves how long this reign of universal friendship could last, and whether this falling into each other’s arms of Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, and others was due to any sentiment more deep and permanent than the joyous intoxication caused by this unaccustomed wine of liberty. Like other Englishmen in Turkey at that time, I came to the conclusion that the Young Turks were quite sincere; that they were honestly desirous to have done with internal strife, to give equality to all the elements of the population, and to live in peace and friendship with their non-Moslem fellow-countrymen. The Armenians and Jews have proved their sincerity by cooperating loyally with the Young Turks throughout the parliamentary elections and since. Of the Macedonian Christians the bulk had become weary of bloodshed and the internecine conflict that had brought nothing but suffering and ruin to the population; and there was no insincerity about the friendly relationship that sprang up between the sturdy Bulgarian leaders of fighting bands and their former foes, the Turkish officers, for they respected each other. The civil warfare in Macedonia had been deliberately fomented by the machinations of the Palace gang, to whom the doctrine of _divide et impera_ was ideal statesmanship, and to the intrigues of Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece. There is no reason why, if left alone, these peoples might not dwell together in peace. A short time since a _mollah_, addressing the people, said, “Before the reign of Abdul Hamid the Moslem and Christian mothers used to nurse each other’s children.” But will these Macedonian peoples be left alone by Palace agents of reaction, by those Great Powers whose interests are opposed to the creation of a strong and independent Turkey, and by the greedy little neighbouring states?

It is, of course, too much to hope that constitutional government has put a sudden end to the religious and racial strife in Macedonia. The Greeks in the country have already demonstrated the illusiveness of such an expectation. The Greeks, like the others, welcomed the Constitution and fraternised with their Ottoman fellow-countrymen. Carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment they may have been sincere in their protestations of brotherhood, but one suspects that the mental reservations were at the back of their brains all the while. If one misjudges them in this, then their own actions and the utterances of their press belie them. In the hour of national jubilation they supplied the one discordant note. One of the first uses that they made of the freedom which the Young Turks had won for them was to boycott and insult the Bulgarians in Salonica, and the news came that the Greek clergymen in the interior were once more persecuting the Bulgarian exarchists, and had drawn up prescription lists of the leading Bulgarians with a view to getting them assassinated. The Greek element of the population, as might be expected, was the first to express dissatisfaction with the policy and administration of the Young Turks. The intolerant and often mischievously active Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople, which denied the Bulgarians the use of their own language, supported the Greeks in clamouring for much more than was their due. Their idea of Ottoman citizenship, so far as themselves were concerned, was to avoid all the obligations of that citizenship, while enjoying all the rights conferred by it and retaining all their special privileges intact. They seemed to think that the government of Turkey should be in their hands. During the elections it was they alone who provoked rioting and at Smyrna they created a dangerous disturbance with their armed mobs.