Robert College was an institution for men, founded fifty years ago by Christopher R. Roberts, a wealthy leather merchant of New York. Its early destiny was directed by Dr. Hamlin and Dr. Washburn, two far-seeing statesmen of education. They had steered a course for the institution which had gained at least the passive coöperation of the Turkish Government, while in America it had gained the enthusiastic support of great philanthropists like Cleveland H. Dodge and John S. Kennedy. Gradually there had been added to its faculty men of strong character and profound learning, so that by the time I reached Constantinople it was an institution worthy of all the care that had been lavished upon it. These earnest men had made a real impression upon the life of the Near East. Being the only great seat of learning in that whole large territory, it had attracted the ambitious youth from the remotest Armenia and all the Balkan countries. Bulgaria especially had appreciated its opportunity. Hundreds of the leaders of Bulgarian political and economic life received their training here. In Dr. Gates, the president of Robert College, I found a man who was very useful to me. He had lived many years in Turkey, knew all the chief figures in its public life, and was a profound student of Turkish psychology. In return, I had the pleasure of being useful to him during the trying days after Turkey entered the war. Such was the picture of Constantinople as I saw it during the first four months of my embassy. It was a picture full of strange anomalies and apparent contradictions. Here was I, a native of Europe, representing the greatest republic of America at the court of an Oriental sovereign. Here was I, a Jew, representing the greatest Christian nation of the world at the capital of the chief Mohammedan nation. Here was I, a man without any previous diplomatic experience whatsoever, suddenly projected headlong into one of the most difficult diplomatic posts in the world, as one of the ten personal representatives of the President. Here was a nation, ruled in name by a proud descendant of Mohammed, and ruled in fact by a group of desperate adventurers whose chieftain was an ex-railroad porter. Here was the capital of an ancient and decaying nation, which was soon, because of its strategic position, to become one of the very vital centres of world diplomacy. Here was a wornout empire dying, which in its death agony clutched other peoples still with its withered fingers and was soon to reach up and draw within its fatal embrace, in the death grapple of a world war, boys from the cattle ranges of Australia, aboriginal Indians from the wilds of northwest Canada, peasants from farthest Russia, cockneys from the East End of London, shepherds from the Carpathian Mountains--vast aggregations of soldiers as polyglot as the population of Constantinople itself--that mongrel city which, sitting at the cross roads of ancient trade routes,