Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/43

 Jews are utilized in the British Government without reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.

It was through the Greeks, as the Rûm community is called in the West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820's and were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire. Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over their entire population without community organizations for dissenters or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad tolerance which distinguishes Islam.

The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which had existed between the Sultan and his Rûm community, but not as violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000