Everywhere, at Manissa and Kassaba—even at Salihli, with its houses reduced to four!—we were invited to stay and “put up for the night!” Here were about two hundred inhabitants surviving from two thousand five hundred, and from fifteen to twenty families sleeping in the mosque. Yet, they would “certainly arrange something,” and it needed all my tact to refuse any more extended hospitality than tea and coffee, served on the roof of one of their four houses, from which we could look down upon the skeleton town. Apparently, these stricken people found some sort of comfort in the mere idea of my having _seen_ their suffering, though often enough I could not even find _words_ for the sympathy no one could fail to feel. Once more lunch in the train. Pomegranate seeds should be eaten one by one, a slow process, but as the cheik says “it passes the hours!” He apologised for the number of times I had been reminded of what in Turkey they call “the work of the British ex-Premier.” “I had to expect that,” I replied, “when I came to Anatolia; and it gives me the chance of reminding the Turks what part was played by M. Venizelos!” He tactfully turned the conversation to Oxford, paying a very high tribute to Mr. Asquith’s brilliant son: “A noble character, highly intelligent and broad-minded. A victim of war we could ill afford to lose!” Association inevitably led to the question I must have been asked a hundred times during my journey, “Why does Lloyd George hate us so bitterly? How can he admire the Greeks?” “He knows little of either,” I replied, “nothing, at any rate, from personal observation of them in their own lands. We have first-class Near-East specialists, no doubt; but his chief informants have been nonconformist preachers, even more biassed than he. Nonconformity is the traditional foe of the Turks. Their boasted ‘freedom of thought and conscience’ does not extend to the Servants of the Prophet, and as they once echoed Gladstone, to-day they echo Lloyd George.” “And in America?” asked the cheik. “Their church is an advertising agency. They have transformed ‘dissent’ to a ‘trust.’ Go to the States with an idea, and, if it pleases them, they will ‘put it across’ like any other commodity, as a ‘cute’ business proposition. With a colony of two million Greeks, and, maybe, as many Armenians (whose exaggerated and unchecked ‘lamentations’ have full Free-Church support), America will never give Turkey even a fair hearing. You have read their ‘Press’?” “Alas,” he answered, “I fear the East is losing its faith in the West.” “Do not say that,” I answered. “Men like you, who have known us at our best, must declare that to-day’s madness is but a phase. Tell us these things should never have been and shall not continue. Write as you _can_ write, and teach the people of Europe to be once more themselves. “When East and West shake hands again, there will be peace, and peace we _must have!_”