Hamid's Cheik-ul-Islam, as the great man sat cross-legged under his enormous pumpkin-hat, amidst the picturesque surroundings of historic, ancient, religious ceremony. To him it seemed that for a cheik to dethrone a Sultan, as he foresaw must soon be the command, would be a solemn and awful thing. I could not imagine him modestly waiting for orders, as his successor is waiting to-day. How are the mighty fallen!
Though propaganda has busied itself already, in the attempt to find flaws in the power and popularity of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, his supremacy remains unquestioned. So far, when his party says go, the Assembly goeth, and when he says come, it cometh.
It is certain, nevertheless, that, as the new order settles in its stride, the Government will be confronted with many difficulties of which we cannot as yet foresee the precise nature. M. Kemal is at least two centuries ahead of some of his own Ministers, four hundred years in advance of the peasants, now suddenly, without preparation, made citizens of a Republic—a sovereign people. I have seen the peasants in their homes—those charming little pictures out of the sixteenth century. Without the least knowledge of, or interest in, what we have come to call civilisation, these simple folk have been vegetating through the centuries, free from the noise of great cities and the anxieties of progress. Though always ready to fight and die, as we say "for King and Country," the symbol of their faith and inherited traditions, they had, and still have, no idea whatever of any government system, or who makes the laws. Naturally sober and religious—not poor, since they had always enough bread—these children of the soil have known no ambition to improve their quiet and happy lives.
It may be Kemal Pasha could do more with
