PROFESSOR RAMSAY'S IMPRESSIONS OF TURKEY"

PROFESSOR RAMSAY gives us in this volume some incidental results of the labours which have done so much to illustrate the early history of the Christian Church and of the greatest of its missionaries, St. Paul. His method has been, after exhausting what the library has to tell him, to explore the actual locality. This method, pursued with courage, industry, and patience for many years, has been fruitful in revelations of the present as well as of the past. And these revelations, while they begin with the ordinary experiences of a traveller, end with bringing us face to face with some of the most important questions of modern politics.

The description of the life which the travelling archatologist in Asia Minor—to use the country's most familiar name—sees about him, is as entertaining as it is significant. The explorer has to accommodate himself to a condition of mind to which there is nothing comparable in Western life. His real object is absolutely and hopelessly beyond the comprehension of the people. He is bound to amuse, and in a sense to cajole, them. In the first place, he has to tell them that he comes from London. An imprudent admission that he came from Oxford, or even Aberdeen, would lower him hopelessly in the eyes of his hosts. He would then be a mere villager like themselves. If there is a lady among his party, he will be careful to see that the coffee, the invariable token of hospitality, is offered to her first of all. This is not that the villagers may be taught politeness. It is rather that he may shine with a glory reflected from her. For they at once conclude that she must be a very great person indeed. Here, they think, is a wealthy stranger from the West, and he is careful that a woman should be served before him. She must certainly be "a near relative of the Sultan of Inghilterra." The special object of the traveller must be introduced with the greatest art. That he is looking for gold is the rooted belief of the people, and he has to humour it. Liberal payment for the "written stones" which they show him is an earnest of the treasure which he will share with them. If their faith is shaken for a time by seeing him depart without any visible acquisitions, it soon recovers, and even blossoms into a marvellous legend of how the stranger went away with camel- loads of treasure. More than once Professor Ramsay has found these myths grow up about himself. His most dangerous adversaries he often found in the women, who had a keener eye both to religion—for were not the infidel dogs

• Impressions of Turkey during Twelve Years' Wanderings. By W. M. Ramsay, D.C.L. London : Hodder and Stoughton.

desecrating the cemetery ?—and to the main chance. St. Paul, too, sometimes found the women a source of danger.

But the facts that underlie these humours of travel are sad enough. Nothing could exceed the stagnation and utter hopelessness of rural Turkish life. The Turk, unless circum- stances, either the Conscription or some strong compulsion of want or debt, take him away from his native village, does, and is content to do, nothing. A little work at harvest time, and his harvests are limited to his absolute wants, is all the labour to which he condescends. He lives on the work of the women, who, miserably depressed by the conditions of their life, depress in their turn the prospects of the race. Here is Professor Rainsay's picture of "Turkish Village Life" :—

" There are no shops, no circulation of money, no possibility of exchanging the fruits of labour for pleasures, or luxuries, or any variety from the simplest and barest necessities of life. This may seem an idyllic style of life to some social theorists ; but I should be glad to make them travel continuously for three years among Turkish villages, so that they may realise what the want of sale implies. The shop cannot exist because there is no money to buy from it, and no security for earnings if money could be got; robbery is indeed rare in the villages at present, because there is absolutely nothing to steal; but few men would care to be known as the only person in a village that possessed some money and articles for sale. Moreover, if the shopkeeper escaped open robbery, he would be a prey to the extortionate demands of every zaptieh (policeman). No one tries to earn : there is nothing to earn, and, if he could earn anything, the zaptiehs would hear of it and exact heavy toll on it."

Still, the Turk has qualities of solid worth. "He," says our author, speaking of one who was in his service, "was an excellent specimen of a village Turk; absolutely trustworthy, strong, slow, steady, modest, quiet, perfectly well-behaved," but "perfectly useless in all the departments of work where any skill or readiness was required." He had served, we are told, seven years as a soldier (he had been taken prisoner Lt Plevna), and had received daring that time one dollar

of pay. Wherever there is any life or energy, any trade or manufacture, any making of money, any improvement of any kind, it is the doing of Greeks or Armenians, or it may be co.'. a member of some other race which has adopted Turkish manners but still retains something of its old vigour. The genuine Turk makes nothing new, and repairs nothing old.

Of the governing classes Professor Ramsay has a worse opinion than he has of the governed. There are plenty of good laws, for .lere was in the first half of the century a succession of reforming Sultans who borrowed freely from European codes. But there is not even an attempt to administer them. What else can be expected of an official who, naturally an incapable administrator, has bought his place by bribes, receives, or rather does not receive, a ludicrously inadequate salary, knows that his time is short, and is bound to make a purse while he can ? The hatred with which the Government is regarded by its subjects is widespread and deep, and it is stronger among the Mahommedans than among the Christians, for the Christians are active, intelligent, and, above all, capable of combination. On this point, it is fair to say, Professor Ramsay comes into direct collision of opinion with the "Wandering Scholar" (Mr. Hogarth).

Of the Turkish police, or Zaptieb, our author has nothing good to say. He too is driven, it may be said, to evil courses by necessity, for he is paid practically nothing ; but the courses are very evil. A Zaptieh has no conception of duty as bidding him arrest the criminal and protect the industrious citizen. If a crime has been committed he lays hands, not on the criminal, however notorious his guilt, but on those

who are likely to pay for release. A Turk, for instance, murdered his father-in-law, who lived inconveniently long. Everything was against him; the circumstance of the crime and the inference of the cui bozo. But he was not touched.

A number of Greeks were imprisoned and paid their way out. When the desired sum had been obtained, the police suffered the affair to drop. After all, the man was not likely tc commit another murder, for he had no more fathers-in-law. Why, then, put him to trouble?

The account that Professor Ramsay gives of the Armenians is deplorable. He is not blind to their faults. Their methods in trade are often sordid and dishonest, and they pursue them with great cleverness. (The popular table of values makes an Armenian equal to two Greeks and six Jews.) And they are sadly lacking in courage. But there is nothing to justify the total destruction to which they are doomed. That they are, as the "Wandering Scholar" asserts, a nation of political intriguers, Professor Ramsay absolutely denies. But of their sufferings there can be no doubt. Let us hear what he bas to say :—

" There has been no exaggeration in the worst accounts of ths horrors of Armenia- A writer with the vivid imagination of Dumas and the knowledge of evil that Zola possesses could not attain, by any description, the effect that the sight of one massacre in the Kurdish part of Armenia would produce on any spectator. The Kurdish part of Armenia is the ' black country.' It has become a charnel house. One dare not enter it. One cannot think about it. One knows not how many maimed, mutilated, outraged Armenians are still starving there."

We hope that the St. Tanwe's Gazette will take note. Our author is convinced that this has been the result of the Sultan's deliberate policy. A prophecy that Turkey should fall in the reign of an Armenian Sultan, and the conscious- ness of a strain of Armenian blood in his own pedigree, drove him to the vindication of himself.

There are other notable things in this volume, among them the recrudescence of Mahommedan fanaticism. But they belong, as, indeed, does much of what has been already noticed, to politics rather than to literature. We can imagine that Professor Ramsay has left his peculiar province with reluctance, but that by his outspoken utterances he has deserved well of his country cannot be doubted.