THERE was a married couple who wrangled continually over the question of what sheets to use. The husband preferred calico sheets, the wife was all for linen. How did you settle the business? asked a friend of the husband, when the latter confided to him the story of the dispute. Oh well we compromised eventually,'' said the husband, we use linen sheets."'
Only at one point does the analogy begin to halt. The wife in the story seems to have been satisfied with the bed she made for herself. There is no assurance that Turkey will stay satisfied with the bed that the Powers have made for her.
True, a conciliatory spirit is said to have reigned at Mudania and righteousness and peace made an outward display of kissing each other. But it is one thing to be conciliatory when the other party in the discussion has thirty thousand hard-bitten troops and nine capital ships, not to mention cruisers, destroyers, submarines and monitors within hail; and something quite different when the men and ships have gone home again. Looking at the Mndania conference from a purely Turkish point of view, one easily imagines that the first preoccupation of Ismet Pasha was to cozen Great Britain into removing those inconvenient battle ships and soldiers, which remain the last forlorn guarantee of the freedom of the Dardanelles and the neutral zone. He had got everything else with an ease which may well have surprised him. It needed only a few of the words that are smoother than oil to get the-rest. Why risk a fight, in which the Turks would start with the moral disadvantage of public opinion ai] against them, with a people who, as Ismet Pasha would vividly remember from the story of Palestine and Mesopotamia. have a stubborn habit of going through to the hitter end once they have begun to fight?
Therefore Ismet signed, with mental reservations or without hardly matters. In the nature of things the Turks cannot be supposed to like the idea of open Dardanelles and neutral zones and there are abundant elements of discord in the Near East and the Mudania agreement, from which a combination of events might arise that could easily be made to justify a rupture of the bargain, without too violent a falsity to Ismet's signature and the handshake given to Sir Charles Harington. The fact that Greece has withheld her signature is ominous, the more so for the reason given, namely, that the question of the real frontier of Thrace was ignored and that the issues were political. A large proportion of the troubles that have sprung from the Treaty of Versailles are due to that same dangerous principle notwithstanding all the cry of national self-determination. Alone, the Greek protest might be disregarded. But the Little Entente will be with her and especially Rumania, justly fearful of the consequences of the new friendship of Moscow and Constantinople. What, moreover, will happen when the projected peace conference meets at Venice or wherever it is to be, and the Soviet demand to send their representatives, which demand has already been endorsed by the Kemalists? And what becomes of the French dream of bolstering up Turkey as a barrier against Russia, which took no account of the natural probability of an alliance between companions in misfortune, or of the fact that the new Turkey is no more the same as the old Turkey than is new Russia the old Russia?
One of the most interesting figures in the whole story is that of Sir Charles Harington, the British High Commissioner. Whether it be really tre or not that he disobeyed orders from London, in the matter of the suggested ultimatum to the invaders of Chanak, he appears always as a dramatic figure, in the little fluff of temper with which he warned the Turks at Mudania against pressing Britain too far, in that fine phrase about its being the spirit that matters and not the form where neutral zones are at stake, in the final offer of his hand to Ismet. The thought occurs that, like many good men before him, Sir Charles may have succumbed a little to the hypnotic spell which the Turk casts over all who come in contact with him. For it is an awkward fact of the Near East that all who have lived there are as loud in praise of the Turks as in contempt of their neigh-hours, though, we believe, a sharp distinction is drawn between Turkey official and otherwise. But we can only guess at the difficulties which Sir Charles Harington has had to face as much from his own side as from the other. He has unquestionably been a powerful influence in securing peace for the moment. How long it will last is another matter.
Tox1o, Oct. 10.—The wife of Major Hara, who was committed for trial by a court-martial for a breach of responsibility in the guardianship of the Czecho-Slovak arms, committed suicide to-day by jumping overboard from the Shimonoseki-Fusan Ferry. The arrest of her husband is believed to have been the cause of her suicide.—Reuter.
Mr. Cecil Clementi,—c.3t.c., Colonial Secretary, British Guiana, has been appointed as Colonial Secretary, Ceylon, in succession to Sir Graeme Thomson, k.c.p., Mr. Cecil Clementi will be remembered as a former member of the Hongkong Civil Service. Kducated at St. Paul's School, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained many distinctions in scholarship, he arrived in Hongkong in 1899. _He passed in Cantonese within a year, and in 1908 he passed also in Pekingese. Mr. Clementi acquired a very sound knowledge of the Chinese language and spoke several dialects. At the time of his appointment as Colonial Secretary of British Guiana, Mr, Clementi was acting Colonial Secretary in, Hongkong. His publications _include—"Cantonese Love Songs," "'Pervigilium Veneris,"' "Summary of Geographical Observations taken during. a journey from Kashgar to Kowloon'? (1907-8) and "The Chinese in British Guiana."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.