of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on the dervish tekkes of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence over the letter of Moslem law.
From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a landing, whether by Ferid's followers from the capital or by Greeks engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line which bent westward via Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same time, this bend of
