While what is best of the old _régime_ still supplies the higher officialdom, nearly all the men belonging to the lower grades of the Civil Service, as I have already pointed out, had become adherents of the Committee of Union and Progress some time before the outbreak of the revolution. Most of these men, under the corrupt system that then prevailed, had to supplement their miserable pay, generally in arrears, by taking _bakshish_ and by robbing the State in other ways. This general impurity of the officialdom was loathsome to many of those who were compelled to follow the almost universal practice in order to keep themselves and their families alive. Minor officials knew that what was wrung from the people in the form of taxation was not spent for the country’s good, but was for the most part appropriated by the Palace gang, and it was but natural that they helped themselves to a share. But the Turks, in their dealings between man and man, are among the most honest of people, and public sentiment regarding official corruption has been undergoing a remarkable change since the revolution. The newspapers preached public purity, and the servants of the State began to realise that for the future the misappropriation of public moneys would not be at the cost of the Palace gang as heretofore, but at the cost of their beloved country itself, which was in sore need of money to further its regeneration and to strengthen its defences against the formidable enemies that threatened its integrity. I have told the story of the patriotic civil servants in Salonica, who abandoned their claims to arrears of pay in view of their country’s necessities; I am assured that the same sense of civic virtue has led to a remarkable diminution of the corrupt practices in the various public departments. I have heard it maintained that the Turks cannot change their nature, and that Turkish administration always has been, and always will be, corrupt, whether the form of government be despotic or constitutional. One might as fairly have argued thus about England’s administration in India, or in the British Isles themselves, but a few generations ago. A people who, like the Turks, are honest as individuals, and intensely patriotic, are likely to arrive at the right moral sense in a matter like this. The Japanese, who, while being as patriotic as the Turks, are not remarkable for commercial probity, regard it as far more criminal to embezzle the country’s funds than to cheat the individual; but Japan is the only country which has attained this high ethical standard. CHAPTER XVII _MUTINOUS PALACE GUARDS_