Ambassadorial staff has left such dealings severely alone, a course of conduct which has redounded to England’s honour in the past; and as it has always been highly appreciated by the best class of Turks, even in the worst days of England’s unpopularity at the Palace, it can scarcely fail to redound to her permanent advantage in her dealings with Turkey in the future. For here we have an ideal of conduct worthy of a great nation. Turkish diplomatists have always been picturesque figures in European society even when their salaries were in arrear; but when they return to Constantinople they are to be pitied. Many of them have been spoiled by their experience in other lands. A few years in the social whirl of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or London does not improve them: the Mohammedans in particular are apt to acquire undesirable habits and modes of thought. They become imbued with the worldly cunning, the artificiality and insincerity of European fashionable life, with the extravagant homage Europeans pay to social position, so different from the patriarchal instincts of home, and they are consequently disenchanted when they return to Constantinople to find that they are nobodies, mere hangers-on at the Palace, perhaps destined to spend years as suppliants for work. Without private means, accustomed to spend money like water, these officials are in a hopeless plight. Society in London and Paris has deadened every unspoilt interest and ideal. They have become sceptics and cynics. I met one who was the son of a Minister, said to be one of the most notorious personages in Turkey. He quoted Renan and La Rochefoucauld, and would tell you that vanity and egotism are the driving forces of every human action. Such a man finds his countrymen stupid, not “up-to-date.” He believes Turkey to be rotten to the core, and if you tell him that you are a philo-Turk he will take you for a rogue who is in the pay of the Palace. Has the Sultan “received” you or not? That is all that interests him about you. And if you ask him what he does to earn a living, he will be quite surprised. He is military attaché of the Ottoman Embassy at X. “Yes, but what are you doing here?” “Oh, I’m on leave.” “Yes, but surely not permanently?” “Well, for a year or two.”