wrenching Anatolia away from the Sultan and his Grand Vizier while refraining from any violation of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.
Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o'clock every day but Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western dress and kalpaks, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army days, and hojas in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the intermittent tinkle of the Speaker's hand-bell did little to abate it, for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.
The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to be the country's needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and more money became available, practice might modify it but with the loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt at an ultimately
