A very considerable step in advance in the way of Turkish sovereignty and Turkish economic patriotism was the organisation and--since September 1916--execution of the neo-Turkish autonomic customs tariff, which with one blow gives Turkish finances what the Government formerly managed to extract painfully from the Great Powers bit by bit, by fair means or foul, at intervals of many years, and which with its hard-and-fast scale of taxes--which there appears to be no inclination in political circles at the moment to modify by trade treaties!--means an exceedingly adequate protection of Turkey's national productions, without any reference whatever to the export interests of her allies, and is a very strong inducement to the renaissance of at any rate the most important national industries. The far-flung net of the "Djemiet" (whose acquaintance we have already made in another connection), that purely Turkish commercial undertaking with Talaat Bey at its head, regulating everything as it did, taking everything into its own hands, from the realising of the products of the Anatolian farmers (and incidentally bringing it about that their ally Germany had to pay heavily and always in cash, even although the Government itself owed millions, to Germany and got everything on credit from flour out of Roumania to paper for their journals) to the most difficult rationing of towns, forms a foundation for the nationalising of economic life of the very greatest importance. The establishment of purely Turkish trade and transport companies, often with pensioned Ministers as directors and principal shareholders, and the new language regulations and other privileges will soon cut the ground away from under the feet of European concerns. Able assistance is given in this direction by the _Tanin_ and the _Hilal_ (the "Crescent"), the newly founded "Committee" paper in the French language (when it is a question of the official influencing of public opinion in European and Levantine quarters, exceptions can be made even in language fanaticism!) in which a series of articles invariably appear at the founding of each new company praising the patriotic zeal of the founders. Then again there are the increasingly thinly veiled efforts to establish a purely Turkish national banking system. Quite lately there has been a movement in favour of founding a Turkish National Bank with the object of supplanting the much-hated "Deutsche Bank" in spite of the credit it always gives, and that international and preponderatingly French institution, the "Banque Impériale Ottomane," which had already simply been sequestrated without more ado. The Turks have decided, too, that the mines are to be nationalised, and Turkish companies have already been formed, without capital it is true, to work the mines after the war. The same applies to the railways--in spite of the fine German plans for the Baghdad Railway.