When we think of the means of communication with the outer world, the change is extraordinary. For the voyage from England to Constantinople a sailing vessel took usually thirty to sixty days. It might be even three months, as an Englishman still living in the city found, in 1845, in his own case. To-day one travels by rail to London in three and a half days. Letters from England took ten days. There was a weekly European mail _viâ_ Trieste, and three times a month _viâ_ Marseilles. Now, a European mail arrives daily. The postage on a letter was 1s. 4d. where now it is 2½d. It is impossible to exaggerate the influence upon the life of the place due to this close connection by steamship and by rail with the Western world. The Ottoman authorities were not altogether mistaken, from their point of view, when they looked with disfavour upon the junction of the railroads in Turkey with the European railway system. That junction, it was thought, would facilitate the military invasion of the country. But ideas travel by rail, as well as soldiers. And the invasion of a country by new ideas may have consequences as formidable and far-reaching as any that arms can introduce. The completion of the railroad between Constantinople and Vienna in 1888 may be regarded as the conquest of the city by foreign thought and enterprise. Little, perhaps, did the crowds, that gathered at the Stamboul railway station on the 14th of August in that year to witness the arrival of the first train from the Austrian capital, appreciate the significance of that event. But it was the annexation of Constantinople to the Western world. New ideas, new fashions now rule, for better and for worse. And soon the defects and the charms of the old Oriental city will be a dream of the past.