an hour of his sleep (for that is what it will mean) to my entertainment, because I have forgotten my duty.
"Do not hesitate," he went on, "to tell me of anyone you would specially like to meet, man or woman. It shall be arranged. . . . Fethi Bey will lunch with you to-day. Whom else shall I invite?"
I said that I should, one day, like to see Younous Nadi Bey, the editor of Yeni Gun and President of Commission for Foreign Affairs in the Grand National Assembly. "He must be interesting, since our Press describe him as a 'man who ought to be shot'!"
I found this gentleman, as I expected, well worth going out of one's way to meet. Without the exquisite manners of Hussein Djahid Bey, he is one of those men who, having made up his own mind about right and wrong, never hesitates to act.
At any rate, until he is shot, he will not allow the Government to sleep, nor to trust Europe without sufficient guarantees. He graciously wrote in Yeni Gun that I had given him some very valuable information about our policy. I certainly did my best to explain Lord Curzon's position. Neither he nor Fethi Bey, however, could understand how he could stay in the new Cabinet. I scarcely expected that they, or any foreigner, could realise the full measure of England's folly in putting the whole machinery of government into one man's undisputed control. Like everyone else nominally in power, the Foreign Minister became a mere cypher.
"Why did he stand it?" they asked.
"For the moment, no protests would have had any effect. His resignation might easily have brought in a far more complete collapse, and, meanwhile, he probably felt that the interests of Conservatism were, to a large extent, in his hands. Lord Curzon knows the East, and he knows what ought to be done. As Goethe says: 'Between the knave and the fool, one should always choose the knave.'. . . Gegen die Dumheit, kämpfen die Götte selbst vergebens. (Even the gods fight in vain against stupidity.)"
Again and again I try to assure them that our
