Yet the miserable, exploited populace seemed powerless to impress its wishes on the Government. It was too disunited and too listless for action. A total lack of national consciousness made Constantinople a capital without a country. The population was a haphazard jumble of races, an _olla podrida_ of peoples that nothing, not even hunger and tyranny, could mould into a coherent whole. They murmured individually, but collectively they remained resigned and silent. If circulation be the test of a city's vitality it proved Constantinople to be at very low ebb. All Mediterranean peoples move slowly in the streets; but the Constantinopolitans of 1918, I noticed, seemed to get nowhere; they crawled about aimlessly, or leaned against the walls and doorways in fatalistic inaction, _waiting for something to happen_. In any case, the least attempt at organized protest was likely to lead to sudden disappearances. The dungeons of Stamboul jail were crammed with Greek, Armenian, and Turkish suspects; the infamous "Hall of Justice," in the Ministry of War, echoed the cries of prisoners whose interrogators extracted "information" by means of the bastinado. Open malcontents were hanged daily. Every decent-living person was likely to feel the tentacles of Young Turk tyranny, as personified by Bedri Bey, Prefect of Police, and Djevad Bey, Military Governor of Constantinople. Only the unrighteous flourished. The speculation and graft were colossal, and beyond the most extravagant dreams of the British brand of war profiteer. Everybody was on the make. Ministers and high officials received huge bribes, little politicians made little fortunes by acting as go-betweens, rich merchants manipulated so as to get hundreds per cent profit. To take but a few of the swindles that I remember from my Constantinople days, there were: the Smyrna sugar _affaire_, involving the barefaced theft of twenty truckloads of a consignment from Austria; the tobacco swindle, which made three directors of the Régie very wealthy men within a month; the cocaine and quinine corner, engineered by a few Jewish speculators, so that for a time the doctors could obtain these drugs only at the price of a hundred pounds a kilo; the oil scandal, the wood scandal, and the widespread flour-adulteration scandal, whereby the lowest grade of bread, which was all that the poor could afford, became not only unnourishing but inedible. There being no system of rationing, only the well-to-do could buy the dearer necessities of ordinary life. The poor remained sugarless, for example, because sugar cost from two pounds sterling a kilo; and the chances were that even when bought at that price it would have been mixed with powdered marble. Thousands actually starved; while the beautiful island of Prinkipo, with its summer palaces and villas, swarmed with oily, scoundrelly, enormously wealthy Levantine vulgarians.