The first paragraph refers to an address I had made in May. The Reverend J. Wesley Hill, of the Metropolitan Temple, had one of the windows of his church dedicated to the Roosevelt Administration and I was asked to deliver the principal address. I took for my subject "The Spirit of the Roosevelt Administration," and reviewed the leading progressive acts of the Administration and pointed out how they were all aimed to secure the rights and enlarge the opportunities of the plain people. I had in mind counteracting the influence then current to belittle the work of the Roosevelt Administration. For with the beginning of the Taft Administration, the reactionaries in and out of Congress had become more bitter and outspoken in their opposition to the Roosevelt policies; it seems that they were encouraged by the report that a break had taken place between Roosevelt and Taft, and by the fact that certain Senators and members of the House who had fallen out with Roosevelt seemed to be specially welcomed at the White House. My address was therefore widely quoted in the press and subsequently circulated in pamphlet form. I quote one of its salient paragraphs:
All the Roosevelt measures and policies were based not only upon moral convictions, but upon a statesman's forethought for the welfare of the country. That he would encounter the powerful opposition of the offending corporate interests was to be foreseen and expected. All reforms and reformers no less in our country than in others have encountered the reactionaries of privilege and power, who persuaded themselves that their so-called vested interests, however acquired and however administered, were their vested rights. These trespassing reactionaries when not checked and made obedient to the legitimate needs and righteous demands of the many produced a spirit of revenge which broke out into revolution at the extreme opposite end of the social system.
On August 18th Mrs. Straus and I left New York on the S.S. Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm for Cherbourg. A week later we were in Paris, where we met Mrs. Roosevelt with three of her children, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin. During the fortnight of our stay we saw a great deal of them and several times we went to the theater or sight-seeing together. Mrs. Roosevelt told me that her husband had solicitously inquired about us in several of his letters and suggested that I write him.
When we reached Constantinople on September 18th, the month of Ramazan had begun, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rifaat Pasha, informed me that the Sultan, now Mohammed V, brother of Abdul Hamid, would probably delay receiving me for a week or ten days, until the middle of Ramazan, and not at the end, as was customary with the former Sultan. Accordingly I was received on Monday, October 4th.
The residence of the new Sultan was in the Palace of Dolma Bagtché. As my rank now was that of ambassador, this audience was a more ceremonious one than those of my former missions. Eight royal carriages came from the Palace to conduct me and my staff to the residence of His Royal Majesty. The first of these, in which I rode, was a most gorgeous affair, with outriders and two postilions in uniforms of brilliant colors standing on a platform in the rear of the carriage. The streets of Pera were crowded with spectators as these dazzling equipages went by, in spite of a light rain that was falling. As we entered the Palace, a large troop of soldiers arranged along each side of the main gate presented arms. I was met by the Chief Introducer of Ambassadors and several other officials, who conducted me to the audience chamber above. With my dragoman, Mr. Gargiulo, I then proceeded with the Chief Introducer of Ambassadors into the presence of the Sultan while the rest of my staff were detained in an anteroom.
The Sultan was a man of about sixty-five, short and very thick-set. He was dressed in military uniform, but appeared physically inert and clumsy. During the whole thirty-three years' reign of his brother, Abdul Hamid, he had been imprisoned in a palace on the Bosphorus and kept under constant guard. He grew up in ignorance and his appearance clearly indicated mental backwardness. His eyes were dull and his appearance almost that of an imbecile, except when an occasional spark of animation was noticeable. Withal he seemed kind and good-natured.
When I made my address, I felt as though I were speaking to an image rather than a human being, and I went through it as quickly as possible, omitting some parts for the sake of brevity, realizing that it was simply a form and that the Introducer of Ambassadors would presently read the whole of it in Turkish. The Sultan was then handed the Turkish reply to read, which he did haltingly, even consulting the Introducer at times to decipher a word. That being over, the doors to the anteroom were thrown open and my staff entered, also the consul-general and his staff, and each man was presented to the Sultan. We were then conducted back to the anteroom and served with cigarettes and coffee, even though it was Ramazan, when Mohammedans do not drink or smoke until after sundown. In a few minutes more we were conducted back to our carriages. The whole function was more in the nature of mimicry on the stage than a serious diplomatic performance.
With my dragoman I paid my official calls upon the Grand Vizier and the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the Porte, both of whom received me in full-dress uniform and immediately returned the calls.
The Government of Turkey under the new régime, with a Sultan who was merely a figurehead, was in the hands of the ministry, and the ministers in turn were appointed and controlled by the Young Turks, or so-called party of "Union and Progress" which had brought on the revolution of 1908 and deposed the late Sultan in April, 1909. It required no great insight to see that a government thus controlled by an invisible power without official responsibility could not be one of either liberty or progress; yet the leading ministers were men of ability and some of them men of considerable experience. Rifaat Pasha, for instance, was formerly ambassador to London, an intelligent and thoroughly enlightened statesman. Hussein Hilmi Pasha, the Grand Vizier, was the former member of a joint committee charged with the government of Macedonia. Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, had previously held an inferior position. He was one of the leading representatives of the Young Turk Party and was believed to be the one mainly responsible for the terrible slaughter and martyrdom of Armenians during the World War. After that war he fled to Berlin, where, in 1920, he was assassinated by a young Armenian. Djavid Bey, Minister of Finance, was a remarkably brilliant young man, about thirty-four years old, from Salonica. It was said he was a Donmeh; that is, a member of a sect of apostate Jews also known as Sabbatians from the name of its Messiah or prophet, Sabbataï Zevi, who gave the sect its romantic origin in the middle of the seventeenth century. Professor Graetz gives a full and interesting description of this whole movement in his "History of the Jews."
Among my colleagues were Gerard Lowther, who represented Great Britain; Marquis Imperiali, Italy; and Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, Germany. Because of the lack of general society in Constantinople, the members of the diplomatic corps became very intimate with one another, and this was so with my colleagues generally and especially between the German ambassador and myself, for we were also fellow members of the Hague Tribunal, and in 1907 he was chairman of the German delegation at the Conferences. He was by far the ablest and most forceful diplomat in Constantinople at this period. During his term of office there, German influence in the Ottoman Empire entirely overshadowed the British. This influence started its ascendancy following the visit of the Emperor in 1898, when he obtained the promise of the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway.