Animadversions

Traveling through Palestine and Syria, U. S. Senator William H. King of Utah at length entered Turkey, visited Konia, Smyrna, Angora, Constantinople. From the last place he began a tour of the Balkans, after many weeks arriving in Berlin where he visited his daughter, Mrs. Carl Fischer, wife of an able secretary in the U. S. Embassy there.

At Berlin the Senator was induced to discuss his peregrinations in Turkey. The irreconcilable, who opposed the Turkish-American Treaty for reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, was in a critical mood. As he saw it, Turkey was coming more and more under the thumb of Bolshevik Russia, which is rapidly extending its influence through commercial penetration. Germany's trade position in regard to Turkey, the Senator was convinced, is also fast reaching its pre-War importance, while the positions of Britain, France and Italy are made stationary through jealousy.

There is a situation in Turkey of which Senator King presented two aspects. The basic fact of this situation is that the Turks have moved their capital from Constantinople to Angora, as have the Bolsheviki from Leningrad (Petrograd) to Moscow. At Constantinople many of the Powers have costly embassy buildings and are not disposed, as the Turkish Government would have them do, to move to Angora, which, as a city, is neither prepossessing nor conveniently situate. But the chief reason upon which their refusal is based is the expense of building new embassy or legation quarters at primitive Angora.

Senator King was of the opinion that all the Powers will eventually have to quarter their representatives at Angora for the simple reason that, if they wished to deal with the Government or, to put it another way, to compete with Germany and Russia, they obviously cannot do so from Constantinople.

The Turks, like the Bolsheviki in Leningrad, are allowing Constantinople to crumble. They do this without hesitation, asseverated Senator King, because, according to general opinion in the Near East, they have a secret agreement with Russia. This supposedly means that at some future date Russia may help Turkey to recapture her lost dominions in return for Constantinople, the age-old object of Russian foreign policy.