country which it governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the Assembly were paid out of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments) in their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25 gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.
Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with great devastated areas in the "Pontus," in Cilicia, in the eastern provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic structure
