It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But can the Turks direct this strength from their native military tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal knows it. “Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him. “If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.” II THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE KEMAL’S BIRTH AT SALONICA――HOW HE BECAME A YOUNG TURK――WHAT THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS LIKE――THE DIVISION OF ITS POPULATION INTO RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES――THE WESTERN CHALLENGE OF ITS _Rûm_ (GREEK) COMMUNITY――ITS DUTY TO ISLAM. Forty-two years ago, when Abdul Hamid II ruled in Constantinople and the Ottoman Crescent and Star still floated over Salonica, an underling in the Salonica customs office died, leaving his widow with a small daughter and an infant son on her hands. The daughter in time grew up and married, as is the way of Turkish daughters. The son was intended by his mother for the mosque school and the career of a _hoja_, as is the way of Turkish mothers, but he became fascinated by the uniforms of the Ottoman Army officers whom he saw about the streets, as is the way of Turkish sons. In time he succeeded in passing the examinations for the military preparatory school at Salonica, where his mathematics teacher became so fond of him that he left off calling him by his given name of Mustapha and dubbed him Kemal, a Turkish name meaning rightness. The military preparatory school at Salonica, the officers’ school at Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him, a headstrong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play _Watan_ (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But _Watan_ gave the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time was a rather ridiculous thing to be.