He rose out of the terror of the Hamidian régime, the years that followed, and the humiliation of occupied Smyrna. It needed, however, the suffering and sorrow to which all reformers must serve their apprenticeship to mould his character and to bring him where he now stands. It was the long-suffering martyrdom one saw in the face of his late mother that forced him to realise what he must do, and he has never faltered from the goal.
Only here, beside them, can one understand all the Government has had to do in Angora, and see for oneself how the whole flock still look to this one man for courage and inspiration. Had he lost faith in the goal or in his capacity to reach it, all would have been lost. "Freedom for Turkey or death for the Turks" has been his motto throughout the years.
I suppose that, however often one may proclaim it, they will not believe who have not seen, a new Turkey is born into the world. It is, indeed, idle to weep over the days that are dead and gone, when the Turk counted for nothing in his own land; when the foreigner ruled the roost, and ambassadors were princes! The new Turk has arrived; the member of a new nation. No important demand was made at Lausanne by Turkey that any self-respecting people could be asked to forgo.
And yet the Powers are still attempting to treat with "old" Turkey! We have no longer to maintain our officious, if well-meant, interference on behalf of disloyal minorities; to insist, par exemple, that Christians shall be exempted from military service, as America never exempted her negro population.
No wonder, again, M. Kemal has been more than tempted to wish (what, for no other reason, he could desire) to abolish religion altogether, after the imposition upon Constantinople of that arch-intriguer the Greek Patriarch! When France and Italy recognised the "State" Church for the parasite that may, at any moment, suck up its life-blood, they cast the Church aside. Confronted at the very outset by
