Constantinople is finished! So a reactionary impressionist groaned to himself on a certain summer day—to be precise, on the 24th of July, 1908—when the amazing truth became known that the constitution, suppressed thirty-two years before, had been re-established. Constitutions were well enough in their place, but their place was not Constantinople. A Constantinople at whose gate your Shakespeare was not taken from you as being a perilous and subversive book, a Constantinople through whose custom-house you could not bribe your way, a Constantinople which you might explore ungreeted by a derisive “_Gyaour!_” or a casual stone, a Constantinople of mosques open to the infidel without money and without price, a Constantinople wherein you were free to walk at night without a lantern, a Constantinople indifferent to passports or to ladies’ veils, a Constantinople where it was possible to paint in the streets, to meet and see off steamers, to post a local letter—and, what is more, receive one—a Constantinople without a censor, a spy, or a dog, might be a Constantinople of a kind; but it would not be the true Constantinople. It could never be the impenetrable old Constantinople that lent a certain verisimilitude to stories like “Paul Patoff” and made it possible for a romantic Gladstone to be taken seriously at his most romantic moments. Violated of its mystery, laid open to the deadly levelling of Western civilisation, what could save it from becoming a Constantinople of straight streets, of pseudo-classic architecture, of glaring lights, of impatient tram and telephone bells, of the death-dealing motors that Abd ül Hamid would never allow, of the terrible tourists—the German _Liebespaar_, the British old maid, the American mother and daughter—who insist on making one place exactly like another?