ave for some decades
centred round the principle of Nationality. In adopting Turkish
Nationalism as the basis of their national policy, the Turks have only
abandoned an abnormal state of affairs and thereby placed themselves on
a level with modern nations[4]."

The development of Nationalism among the Turks was a natural phenomenon.
Starting in the West, the movement has been spreading for a century
through Central Europe, Hungary, and the Balkans, till from the Turks'
former subjects it has passed to the Turks themselves. Chance played its
part. Dr. Nazim Bey, for instance, the General Secretary of the "Union
and Progress" Committee, is said to have been fired by a work of M. Leon
Cahun's on the early history of the Turks and Mongols, lent him by the
French Consul-General at Salonika, and the movement was, and still is,
confined to a small _intelligentsia_. But that is the case with other
national movements too, and does not hinder them from being powerful
forces. Turkish Nationalism was kept alive after 1909 by a small group
of enthusiasts at Salonika--their leader was Ziya Bey, who had come up
to the Young Turk Congress from Diarbekir, and was one of the first
converts to the new idea. It gained ground suddenly during, the Balkan
War. The shock of defeat produced a craving for regeneration; the final
loss of Europe turned the minds of the Osmanlis to the possibilities of
Asia, and they were struck by the action of several prominent Russian
subjects of Turco-Tatar nationality, who, out of racial sympathy, had
given their services to the Ottoman Government in this time of
adversity. As Tekin Alp expresses it:

"The Turks realised that, in order to live, they must become essentially
Turkish, become a nation, be themselves.... The Turkish nation turned
aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked instead upon Turania,
the ideal country of the future."

Two years later this "New Orientation" had so mastered the Ottoman
Government that it drew them into the European War.

There are many aims within the new Turkish horizon. Some of them are
negative and non-political, some practical and extremely aggressive.
Ziya Bey's adherents first took in hand the purification of the Turkish
language. A Turkish poet had endeavoured before to dispense with the 95
per cent. (?) of the vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and
Arabic, and "his poetry had to be published in small provincial papers
because the important newspape