TURKEY: Youth Going West

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Turkish re-action to the rejection by the U. S. of the Lausanne Treaty (TIME, Jan. 31) did not fully crystallize until last week. Then, at a Cabinet meeting, Dictator-President Mustafa Kemal Pasha voiced the real dissatisfaction of Turks at the action of the U. S. Senate. The U. S., said Dictator Kemal, in substance, does not understand that the "Terrible Turk" of Ottoman days is extinct. . . . The Young Turks of today are trying harder and with more success than any other backward people to catch up with the march of civilization. . . .

If this be true, if the U. S. Senate did not ratify the Lausanne Treaty because the U. S. mis judges the nature of Young Turkey, what are some facts on which a different judgment may some day be formed? Facts:

¶Polygamy has been slowly dying out in Turkey for more than a century, because of the inability of modern Turkish husbands to support plural wives in the style and under the economic conditions of today. An analagous case is the decrease in the amount of food on Occidental tables since Colonial times of heavy eating when eggs were 4¢ a dozen instead 49¢, and other food prices were proportionate.

The Young Turks simply cannot afford plural wives, and so they are generally content with their new Civil Code, based on the Civil Code of Switzerland and absolutely forbidding polygamy.

¶Post-War Turkey does not em brace those large non-Turkish areas* in which the shortsighted Sultanate shed so much blood to put down the revolts of subject peoples.

Young Turkey is compact, and the dictature of Mustafa Kemal, the Ghazi ("The Victorious"), is absolute over such territory as is left. There is not the occasion for internal strife and wholesale massacre that there once was. ¶ Though the leopard cannot change its spots, the Young Turks naturally feel less ferocity than formerly toward those few Armenians, Greeks and Jews who are now trading quietly in Turkey and paying the present high taxes.

¶ The Turkish Civil Service still remains lamentably corrupt; but the Departments of Justice and Education have been so improved as to be unrecognizable.

The new Swiss-type Civil Code is supplemented by a new German-type Commercial Code; and a Penal Code based on that of Italy has been promulgated. The immense and revolutionary project of scrapping outworn Turkish law (based on the Koran) and substituting Western statutes thus stands today, accomplished.*

¶Many onetime schools of religious instruction have been turned into civil primary schools and lycees, in some of which women are teachers.

Before the Young Turk era it would have been as unthinkable for men to sit under women teachers as for U. S. college students to find their professors replaced by puppy dogs. The mind reels, and all but refuses to grasp that Young Turkey is following the Ghazi in a program as "revolutionary" as though President Coolidge should suddenly demand the nationalization of the railways, and hurry on from that, in a few months, to abolition of private property.

The explanation of the voluntary Turkish social revolution is that Turks see the Coolidge type of nation as a desired goal capable of swift and glorious attainment— where U. S. citizens have not yet sighted any super-Coolidge goal.