in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of that gallows looking in upon them.
The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for the Assembly's use by the construction of a high desk for "Mr. Speaker" in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in semi-circular fashion around the Speaker's desk, the small desks to be used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as any nation has ever attended.
The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are, Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their first session at 1 o'clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the Koran such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on the wall above the Speaker's desk. A free translation of it into English would be: "Let us meet together in council and discuss." It was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople to the Koran itself, on which it was
