ENGLISHMEN who are old enough to remember the Crimean war might well rub their eyes on coming to Constantinople to-day, where the stranger, after being shown the public fountain in Stamboul dedicated by the German Emperor to the Sultan, is taken over the water to Scutari, where, in the most picturesque cemetery in the world, England’s dead warriors sleep under the cool shade of the cypress-tree. Gone are the days when Englishmen and Turks fought as Allies, when the Sultan Abdul Medjid visited the British Embassy as the guest of his trusted friend, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, when English capitalists supported Turkey’s credit, and English merchant princes first introduced railways into Turkey and dominated the sea-borne commerce as well as the passenger traffic of the Levant. In those times the Englishman embodied in the eyes of the Mohammedan Turk all that was estimable and reliable among the “Franks.” Since those comparatively recent days many changes have been wrought. Foreign bankers, powerful international syndicates have encroached upon English financial influence, and nearly all the Turkish railways and most of the shipping have gone into other than English hands. The finest passenger steamers that come to Constantinople are German, Austrian, Italian, and Russian. The dead alone sleep on as before, under the shady groves of Scutari. Whatever may be the causes which have brought about these changes, it is permissible for an Englishman to deplore them, not only on economic grounds, but also as a matter of sentiment and of sympathy with the Turks, who have been the greatest losers thereby. Alas that the supreme ordainment of things in the life of nations, even of whole races and creeds, takes small account of the ups and downs, the sufferings of whole generations of human beings, whatever be their virtues. The Albigenses represented a far higher level of culture, conduct, and principle than those who took up arms against them and brought about their extermination. So also with regard to the Turks in our day, their good qualities are not those which are imperative in order to enable a community to hold its own in times of strenuous commercialism and of unscrupulous political rivalry and intrigue. For many years the traveller entering Turkish territory at the railway station of Mustapha Pasha saw the Custom House officers in ragged uniforms, on the look-out for baksheesh, since their small salary, if ever paid, was certainly in arrear. How could he come to any other conclusion than that conditions prevailed here which are no longer tolerable in Europe? For even in Asiatic Russia, with all its backwardness, they do not exist. This impression of the anachronism of a Turkey in Europe is likely to be applied to Asia as well by those who have traversed that part of the world, unless some drastic administrative and financial reforms are put into force at once.