About this time, December 1908, the Turkish Parliament was inaugurated, and amid the discord of Turkish bands and through avenues of flags and festoons, the procession of deputies and foreign representatives fought its way to the House at Stamboul, to sit for a few months and prove its futility.
The attitude of the Persians, who had been the first to experience the pains and penalties of popular representation, was interesting. It was, of course, popularly supposed that the Persian element in Constantinople and Smyrna—some ten thousand people—displayed heartwhole enthusiasm for the Turkish “Mejliss,” and if the addresses and congratulations of the Persian political clubs were to have been believed, this supposition would have been true. Persians, however, are always alive to the value of expediency, and obviously clubs which, existing only by the tolerance of the Turks, propagated doctrines only to be regarded as heterodox by the Persian Ambassador and consuls, must display conspicuously their sympathy with any popular Ottoman movement.
PERSIAN AND TURK
In the privacy of their own houses, the sarcasm and deprecation of foreigners so near the tip of the Persian tongue found ready articulation.
As Shi’a, these refugees, to put it but mildly, lack sympathy with any movement of the Sunni Turks, and having seen repeated in the election and the arrangement of the Turkish “Mejliss” several of the errors which contributed to the discord and downfall of the first Persian Parliament, were disposed to look on with supercilious superiority at the efforts of a nation which they ever regarded as rather barbarian. Besides which, bad as Persia was under the old regime, the lot of the peasant and the humbler town-dweller was never so bad as was that of the equivalent classes in Turkey; and if there are degrees in the perfection of corruption arrived at by the administrative powers of both empires, there are few experienced Turks and Persians who will not give the palm for completeness in this art to Turkey, at any rate in her Asiatic provinces.
So the Persians, looking on, seeing all the difficulties to be surmounted, difficulties complicated by the turbulent and treacherous temperament of Greek and Armenian, waited to see an eventful crisis, and when it came as they had predicted, the triumphant attitude of “I told you so,” for which they had prepared themselves, was intensified by the feeling of having also scored off an old enemy.
The only immediate outcome of the Parliament’s inauguration, so far as it affected the dweller in the city, was to provide a number of newspapers with columns filled with reports of speeches—no whit more or less puerile than those provided by our Parliament for the London papers—and a large increase in drunkenness, particularly among the police. The provinces responded with their own interpretation of “Hurriat” by lawlessness of every description, which increased to a point almost unknown in Turkish history, at least in the Asiatic provinces, with which alone this book is concerned.
After all, it was a faithful enough repetition of Persia in early 1907, when the dying Muzaffar ud Din Shah granted the first Persian Constitution. In that unfortunate country the ignorant mass looked to the Majlis to produce, within a few days, a panacea for the ills that had grown up and become an integral part of the nation during centuries of misrule, and the failure of the people’s representatives even to adjust minor matters resulted in the outbursts all over the country which eventually, fanned by Muhammad Ali Shah, enabled him to regain his absolute power for a time.
In the Turkish Empire practically exactly the same thing happened. Needless to say, a very large section of the people was vitally interested in the existence of Sultan Abdul Hamid as a despot, particularly those powerful priests and place-holders who amassed wealth by means possible only when the Sultan was there to consent, and participate. The victims of this large class expected that with the proclamation of “Hurriat” (“freedom”) these tyrants would retire swiftly into oblivion, but as time went on and the bloodsuckers (and bloodspillers too) continued their operations with increased vigour, the people, emboldened by the new political doctrines, rose in every direction. Tribes of Arabs and Kurds, who had regarded the new regime as a partial revival of their importance and a return—in a degree—to some of their ancient independence, finding levies upon them of taxes and recruits undiminished, rebelled against the Majlis and Sultan alike—a situation resulting which, at the time of writing,[2] bids fair to give the Turks and their army as much as they can do for some time to come.
It is fair to add that many of these outbursts are said to have been aggravated secretly by Sultan Abdul Hamid, who had submitted with a meekness never seen in the Persian monarch to the drastic changes his people effected. At any rate, his end was the same as that of Muhammad Ali Shah, for after a few months both find themselves deposed and in retirement.