Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/59

 Americanism and their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople, American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word "imperialism" means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet, "Imperialism has never bothered us"

While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the Shiah Moslems of Persia under the suzerainty of the Sunni Caliph and this scheme involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in 1902. But Abdul Hamid