The Turkish Government is very angry that so many facts
about the situation in Constantinople got abroad, especially facts about military disaffection, and has contrived very in- geniously to subject public letters to a censorship. All news- paper correspondents are ordered, when they hear anything, to inquire, before reporting it, whether it is true, making the inquiry at a Press Bureau, freshly established in the Foreign Office. If the Bureau denies the story, as, of course, it will invariably do, they are to believe the Bureau, and write accord- ingly. If they do not, they will be warned, for the first offence, "that they must return to the paths of truth and moderation ;" denounced by name, for the second; and expelled from Turkey, for the third. The result of this absurd scheme, if it could be worked, would be that the Press Bureau would edit all foreign correspondence from Turkey; but, of course, it could not be worked. The Turkish Government, under the Capitulations, has no such right of expulsion; and if it had, it would be defeated every day, the letters appearing, as telegrams often do now, with a well. understood intimation that they come from Odessa, Syra, or Athens. To make the system work at all, the Turkish Government should arrest anybody whose letters home contain disagreeable facts which their friends think fit to forward to the journals, and would even then discover the old truth that secret correspondence is always bitter corre- spondenae.
