Then in Constantinople there was a shortage not only of skilled labour, but of coal for milling purposes. The result was that the townspeople only received a daily ration of a quarter of a kilogramme (about 8 oz.--not a quarter of an oka, which would be about 10 oz.) of bread, which was mostly of an indigestible and occasionally very doubtful quality--utterly uneatable by Europeans--although occasionally it was quite good though coarse. If the poor people in Constantinople wanted to supplement this very insufficient allowance, they could do so when things were in a flourishing condition at the price of about 2-1/2 or 3 piastres (1 piastre = about 2-1/4_d._) the English pound, and later 4 or 5 piastres. Even this was for the most part only procurable by clandestine means from soldiers who were usually willing to turn part of their bread ration into money. This is about all that can be said about the feeding of the people, for bread is by far the most important food of the Oriental, and the prices of the other foodstuffs soon reached exorbitant heights. What were the poor to feed on when rice, reckoned in English coinage, cost roughly from 3_s._ 2_d._ to 4_s._ 4_d._ an oka (about 2-1/2 lb.), beans 2_s._ 4_d._ the oka, meat 3_s._ to 4_s._, and the cheapest sheep's cheese and olives, hitherto the most common Turkish condiment to eat with bread, rose to 3_s._ and 1_s._ 8_d._ the oka? Wages, on the other hand, were ludicrously low. We may obtain some idea of the standard of living from the fact that the Government, who always favoured the soldiers, did not pay more than 5 piastres (about 1_s._) a day to the families of soldiers on active service. I have often wondered what the people really did eat, and I was never able to come to any satisfactory conclusion, although I often went to market myself to buy and see what other people bought. It is significant enough that just shortly before I left Constantinople--that is, a few weeks after the Turko-Bulgarian-German victories in Rumania and the fall of Bucharest--the price of bread in the Turkish capital, in spite of the widely advertised "enormous supplies" taken in Rumania, rose still higher. I cannot speak from personal experience of what happened after Christmas 1916 in this connection, but everyone was quite convinced, in spite of the official report, that the harvest of 1916, despite the tremendous and praiseworthy efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture and the military authorities, would show a very marked decrease as a result of the mobilisation of agricultural labour, the requisitioning of implements, and the shortage of buffaloes, which, instead of ploughing fields, were pulling guns over the snow-covered uplands of Armenia. There was a very general idea that the harvest of 1917 would be a horrible catastrophe. And yet I am fully convinced, and I must emphasise it again, that, in spite of agricultural disaster, Turkey will still go on as a military power.