Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the soldier rather than the statesman, and his remarkable personal prestige has colored his entire Government. Yet it is not sufficient to define him as a soldier. The head of the new Turkish State happens to be a soldier because the dominant tradition of the old Ottoman Empire was the Turkish military tradition. In any country with a great military tradition, the best brains of the country tend to flow into the Army and the best brains of the Army tend to flow into the General Staff. Kemal reached the General Staff of the old Ottoman Army at a time when the best brains in the country were attempting to carry it from those Eastern traditions of government in which it had had a long and rich experience, to the newer Western traditions at which it is still serving its apprenticeship.
If it is possible to press down the difference between these two traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition, government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized and authority is carried down to a popular electorate, represented by deputies in a parliament to which the Government of the day is immediately responsible. Under the Eastern tradition, all things are possible to an individual ruler as long as he disposes of sufficient force to impose them. Under the Western tradition, all things are possible to an electorate as long as it abstains from force in imposing them. London is the home of the modern Western tradition but to find the home of the Eastern tradition today it is necessary to go farther east than Turkey, to a country like Afghanistan. One episode which illustrates the contrast between the two traditions, is that of an Afghan notable who happened to be in London at a time when the Government fell, and who lost no time in sending an aide into the West End to purchase arms with which to defend himself. For further illustration, I might draw on my own experience. I called on the Afghan Ambassador at Angora in the course of my stay there and discovered, I thought, an astonishing ignorance of our Western ways. His was a charming tea, served by a charming gentleman who kept a charming revolver on his desk throughout the period of our talk and two charmingly brawny Secretaries of Embassy close at hand in case, I suppose, of emergency. It happened, however, that no emergency developed and our talk of an hour’s duration ended as happily as it began.
But if we Westerners have slowly built up our own peculiar traditions of government at home, we have not always carried them with us into the East. In our contacts with Eastern peoples in their own lands, we have tended to adopt the Eastern tradition. We have met force with force and it is possibly difficult to blame the more provincial of Eastern peoples if they conclude from their contacts with us along their own frontiers, that our traditions of government are the same as theirs. We cherish at home the reign of law, but our imperialisms in the East have not always exemplified our love of law. Probably their relatively lawless nature has been justified by necessity, for the complicated machinery of Western trade demands conditions of security if it is to work smoothly. Doubtless imperialism which is the simplest method of affording it a degree of security, will continue as long as it is able to command superior force, although naturally it is a daily humiliation to the strongest of Eastern peoples. Necessity will tend to justify its continuance until Easterners demonstrate that they can adapt our tradition of law to their own needs and that they are themselves able to afford legitimate Western trade (not of the get-rich-quick sort) that security which it has a right to expect. It is this task of adapting the Western tradition of law to Eastern needs, of substituting in the East a new and Eastern regime of law for the lawlessness of imperialism, while disturbing as little as possible the inter-flow of sound and legitimate trade—it is this task which constitutes the Turkish problem today.
Kemal is a Westerner who was born under the Eastern absolutism of Abdul Hamid. He has known the East, the West and that curious offspring of both of them, imperialism. He is the son of a country which has belonged in the past to any man who proved strong enough to take it and which has rewarded its strong men with prestige or a cup of poison or both. He has been a consistent Young Turk, although his beliefs once flung him out of his country in disgrace and later tossed him the dying remnant of his country to do what he could with it. In his unaffected bearing, he embodies the old Ottoman officer type at its best, and at its best that type was a very fine type indeed. He is a great Turk and as a man among men he towers head and shoulders above the type of man which our Western democracies have sometimes projected into political life. A century from now, the historian of the future will see him in a larger and more adequate perspective than we are able to look upon him as he moves among us today.
He resumed his chair behind the desk, with the green and gold banner hanging limply in the corner behind him, and took from his pocket a string of amber beads with a brown tassel. His cheek bones are rather high, his nose is straight and strong, his mouth is straight and thin-lipped. I think a cartoonist would find him easy to do—a towering iron-gray kalpak, and beneath it the straight strong lines of the eyebrows, the mouth and the chin. He wore an English shooting suit of tweed, a gray soft collar with a gray tie, and high-laced tan boots with the short vamp which is native to the Near East. Physically, he gives a lean, wiry impression.
He speaks either Turkish or French (he knows no English) in the mildest of tones, hardly above a whisper and with a blunt frankness which manages to remain free from any suggestion of truculence. I formed the impression that he does not find talk congenial; he says what needs to be said but he prefers to listen. Certainly he is quite devoid of that love of talk which sometimes afflicts Western statesmen and which is one of the less beautiful aspects of our Western tradition of popular government. Like any other good soldier, there is not the faintest trace of pose in him. He does not employ to Westerners the, to us, exaggerated courtesies of the East; when he does talk to us, he talks as we ourselves endeavor to talk to each other, with simplicity and directness. At one time in our talk, I asked him for photographs of himself since they were not then obtainable elsewhere in Angora and weeks afterward I happened to mention the matter to a Western friend in Constantinople. “What did he tell you?” “That he would have them sent me the next day.” “And did he?” “Yes.” My friend thought it over; he has lived in Constantinople for some thirty years. “If you can really get any Turk to give you a definite word on any subject under the sun without making you wait a month for it,” he said finally, “its fairly certain there’s been a revolution in the country.”
I had a feeling from the first that I was talking to an iron image, that his brain was miles away busying itself with a thousand and one affairs. He had a manner of dismissing question with question as though he were very busy but desired not to be discourteous, and the heaped-up pile of papers on his very neat and orderly desk made it probable that this was precisely the case. I changed my tactics finally and began firing questions at him abruptly, determined to get his undivided attention. He reached up suddenly with a gesture which might have savored slightly of impatience, and flung aside his kalpak, revealing a tall sloping forehead, fringed at the top with very thin brown hair, a forehead totally out of keeping with the severely simple lines of his face. If his face is the iron face of the cavalry officer, his forehead is the forehead of the statesman.
I kept on firing questions at him until I felt that his brain had paused at its distance to listen. I continued to fire questions at him until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes, staring out at its questioner:
“Suppose Turkey’s Western population leaves the country en masse when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?”
“The West can help us or hinder us greatly,” he said, “but it ought to be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in Turkey.”