Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/217

 local economics, agriculture, public works and social services"

The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire, remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the iron hand of the Assembly's Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.

Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West. Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which