When Turks tell me it is as easy “to buy” one of our officers as those of other nations, that they have done so over and over again in Constantinople, I try to say that it cannot be. When my host tells me they paid £6,000 sterling for our men’s assistance to charter a boat and escape from Malta, I can only admit, in silence, that they did—somehow—escape. When I learn that at least one correspondent in Constantinople is subsidised by the Greeks, I can bear no more. Whence have bribery and corruption invaded our country against the traditions of centuries? I told them I used to feel that “I was sitting on a rock amidst howling and roaring seas; now even the rock itself is sinking.”
To pay honour where honour is due, I compliment the Minister on the splendid “foreign” news of both his papers—the Tanine and the Vakit. I wish to-day that I knew the language and could read the articles by Hussein Djahid and Ahmet Emine. Even translated, I find them full of sound commonsense and beautifully written. If at times they are bitter, there is none of that sensationalism which our Press has lately borrowed from the States.
My host is due at his office at 9.30, but, though he has ventured to glance at his watch, the talk continues. At about 10.30, I casually ask: “Are you not going to your office to-day?”
“When you allow it,” was the startling answer.
Now, surely, time is of importance at least to a responsible Minister? Yet he will cheerfully give up an hour of his sleep (for that is what it will mean) to my entertainment, because I have forgotten my duty.
“Do not hesitate,” he went on, “to tell me of anyone you would specially like to meet, man or woman. It shall be arranged.... Fethi Bey will lunch with you to-day. Whom else shall I invite?”
I said that I should, one day, like to see Younous Nadi Bey, the editor of Yeni Gun and President of Commission for Foreign Affairs in the Grand National Assembly. “He must be interesting, since our Press describe him as a ‘man who ought to be shot’!”
I found this gentleman, as I expected, well worth going out of one’s way to meet. Without the exquisite manners of Hussein Djahid Bey, he is one of those men who, having made up his own mind about right and wrong, never hesitates to act.
At any rate, until he is shot, he will not allow the Government to sleep, nor to trust Europe without sufficient guarantees. He graciously wrote in Yeni Gun that I had given him some very valuable information about our policy. I certainly did my best to explain Lord Curzon’s position. Neither he nor Fethi Bey, however, could understand how he could stay in the new Cabinet. I scarcely expected that they, or any foreigner, could realise the full measure of England’s folly in putting the whole machinery of government into one man’s undisputed control. Like everyone else nominally in power, the Foreign Minister became a mere cypher.
“Why did he stand it?” they asked.