But more interesting far than its scenic attractions and its historic ruins, its railroads and various industries, are the people of Anatolia. And by the people I mean not the foreign element--the Greeks, Armenians, Circassians, and others, so conspicuous in Smyrna and Constantinople--but the Osmanlis. For it is not in the large cities of Turkey, where there is always such a heterogeneous population, that the Ottoman is found at his best but in the small towns and villages of the interior of the country and particularly in that portion of the Ottoman Empire which formerly constituted the emirates of Osman and Orkhan. No people in the world, it is safe to say, have ever been more misunderstood or more misrepresented than the Osmanlis. For generations they have been regarded as a nation guilty of every crime and steeped in every vice. But since the Bulgarian agitation, in 1876, when Carlyle wrote “the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question, and the country left to honest European guidance,” the Osmanlis have been treated as a nation of pariahs who had not to their credit a single redeeming feature. They have been denounced as cruel, bloodthirsty, treacherous, dishonest, intolerant, and fanatical in the extreme. They have been pilloried as a nation of gross voluptuaries totally devoid of all moral sense and incapable of any noble sentiment and generous action. They have been stigmatized as a cancer on the body of humanity that should be dealt with in the most drastic manner by the Great Powers of Europe. Gladstone expressed public opinion when, speaking on the Eastern Question, he said, “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying away themselves.... One and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” But what is the truth about the Osmanlis? Are they the vile and abominable people which Carlyle’s epithet would indicate? And are the Christian nations of Europe justified in adopting towards them what the English Conservatives aptly termed “Gladstone’s bag and baggage policy”? Let us see.