The rumours of a revolution in Turkey have been so many and
frequent, that I must state they have not the least foundation
in fact. Why should the British public be fed on these silly
canards? Time and again I have read long dispatches from
Athens and Mytilene, which purport to describe the troubled
conditions in Turkey. I remember an item that told of a riot
in Constantinople. Reference was made to the looting of
the Pera Palace Hotel by a “stop-the-war” mob. On the date
mentioned in the dispatch I was in this hotel. The whole story
was pure invention. Personal observation convinced me, that
Constantinople was the most normal of all the capitals of the
nations at war.
Sir William Osler, the eminent physician, in a speech recently delivered
at the Leeds Luncheon Club, said that:
In a great crisis like the present we are all a bit surcharged
emotionally. Judgment becomes difficult, and we become
weak-minded and believe anything any Ananias says. Who could
have dreamt that so early in the war there were so many liars
in the country as the men and women who saw the Russian troops?
An instability of this sort leaves us an easy prey for the
Yellow Press. Think of all the legless, armless, eyeless
Belgians that crowded their columns. All had been seen by these
perverters; few, if any, by the camera. What a triumph of
unstrung nerves was that matter of the war babies.
Russians, mutilated Belgians and “war-babies,” were said to be in our
midst, and yet it took us weeks to learn the truth. We shall indeed be
hysterical if we allow ourselves to be hoaxed about alleged events in the
recesses of Asia Minor.
It is well to recall that Sir Henry Layard in the report of the Bulgarian
atrocities, from which we have quoted, stated that: “there are persons,
and amongst them I grieve to say Englishmen, who boast that they invented
those stories with the object of writing down Turkey, to which they were
impelled by a well-known hand.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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