Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/80

 the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic Sokols and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, "I am a Turk, my race and language are great." It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.

The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey's exploits with the raider Hamidieh during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine's preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.

Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire's break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the "un