On Monday, at Angora, Turkey was declared a Republic, and
Mustapha Kemal Pasha was elected President unanimously. Less than half the delegates of the Assembly, however, were present at the election. Ismet Pasha, who negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, was appointed Prime Minister. When the proclamation was published a salvo of a hundred and one guns was fired. The Times correspondent at Constantinople says that when the news arrived there the city began" dutifully to beflal,7 itself," but the population was really dumbfounded by recent events and the general comment was by no means favourable. It is all an astounding culmination in the history of the Turks. They have lost all their outlying provincts and are now a small nation of no more than five or six million people. They still defy the great Western Powers, yet they have borrowed from the West the whole of their new political machinery. The Young Turks made much the sarpe liberal professions that Mustapha Kemal is making now, yet they set up one of the worst tyrannies in history and massacred more freely even than Abdul Hamid himself. We shall see whether in this respect there will be a repetition of history. Already in the name of Ilepublicanism there is a dictatorship. Of course, we hope that Turkey will keep the peace and prosper, but if she does she will have become something quite different from the religious autocracy which invaded Europe.
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