were voting for Mussulman candidates or Mussulmans for Christian candidates. The optimistic Minister of the Interior, Haki Bey, made the following statement: "In our Parliament there will be no Turkish, Armenian, Greek or Jew Deputies; they will all be Ottoman Deputies." If one judged from the appearance of the surface one would have concluded that the proclaimed ideal of the Young Turk party—the union of peoples of all races and creeds within the Empire -was in a fair way to being realised.

The Turkish election law-which is now being revised-defines so vaguely the qualifications for a voter that a good deal of misunderstanding arose. Thus the Greek farmers in Epirus clamoured for the franchise, which had been denied to them on the ground that they were not taxpayers, the tithes being paid, not by them, but by the owners of the land. The Greeks maintained that, as this tax is calculated on the produce of the soil and not on the rent paid, the farmers were virtually the taxpayers and therefore entitled to vote. To decide what constituted a taxpayer in the eyes of the election law must have puzzled the brains of many a Turkish official at this time, especially when he had before him some cunning and plausibly argumentative Greek, determined to have his vote by hook or by crook. In an amusing case which was brought before my notice an importunate person was allowed to vote in his

capacity as a taxpayer, though the only proof that he was such lay in the fact that he had on his back a coat made of a foreign cloth, which, if not smuggled, must have contributed to taxation in the form of Customs duties as it entered the country. The Turkish equivalents to our revising barristers had plenty of work to do in all the constituencies between Macedonia and Bagdad. It reminded one pleasingly of home to read of these things; but there were differences to be noticed here and there between the British and Turkish frame of mind during a General Election. For example, the Turkish electorate appears to be somewhat more exacting than ours, and it was announced that at Gumuldjina the imams, carrying the sacred banners from the mosques, assembled with ten thousand Mohammedans in front of the Municipality, to protest against the nomination as parliamentary candidates of "obscure and undistinguished individuals."

The following are the more important features of the electoral regulations under the existing law. The elections are quadrennial. Roughly speaking fifty thousand voters are represented by one member of Parliament. There are two classes of electors: each group of about five hundred electors of the first class selects an elector of the second class, and the electors of the second class nominate and elect the Deputies. The following The following are among the qualifications for the franchise: An elector

must be a male Ottoman subject, over twenty-five years of age; he must be a payer of direct taxes; he must have lived a year in the district in which he exercises his right of voting, and must produce a certificate from the moukhtar of his former place of domicile showing that he is entitled to vote ; employés of the State and officers in the army, from the rank of lieutenant upwards, have the right to vote in whatever electoral districts they may happen to be during the elections; soldiers on furlough can vote in their own districts. A man is disqualified from voting if he has been condemned for a crime, if he is an undischarged bankrupt, if his character is notoriously bad, if he is acting as servant to another individual, if he has represented himself as being of other than Ottoman nationality. A Deputy must be over thirty years of age, must know the Turkish language, and must possess the qualifications of an elector. A good many of these regulations were not insisted on rigidly at the recent elections; for example there are several Deputies who cannot speak Turkish.

The electoral laws provide heavy punishments for those who employ violence, intimidation, or corruption at elections. By Article 72 of the Constitution the penalty for influencing elections by false statements and calumnies is a fine of forty pounds and a period of imprisonment of from one year up to five years, according to the gravity

of the offence; so it would be a dangerous thing in Turkey for partisans to post the walls with cartoons such as those which have exerted no small influence at General Elections in England. Another curious regulation, the object of which is to prevent rioting, compels the elector to return to his home as soon as he has registered his vote. It is also laid down that electors, before they drop their voting papers into the urn, must attend the prayers of the imam (or priest in the case of a Christian voter) for the prolongation of the Sultan's life and the increase of his glory.

In the late autumn, throughout the Turkish Empire, the elections took place. Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Wallachs, Armenians, Jews, Latins, Arabs, Syrians, Kurds, Druses, elected their Deputies to a Chamber which represents so many races, interests, creeds and languages that Turkey's new Parliament in all probability would have been a Babel of vain talk and no doing had it not been that the cause of the Committee of Union and Progress triumphed in European Turkey and in Anatolia, and secured many adherents in other parts of the Empire, with the result that the nominees of the Committee formed a large majority in the Chamber.

I was in Constantinople during the election operations, and very interesting and picturesque they were. On the night preceding the polling

the big drums were beating loudly in the Turkish quarters of the capital to remind the electors that it was their duty as good citizens of a free country to go on the morrow to the appointed places and drop their voting papers in the ballot boxes. On the following morning the great city presented a very animated appearance. Large processions were formed to carry with due ceremony the urns, or ballot boxes, to the various mosques, Greek and Armenian churches, synagogues, police stations, and other public buildings, in which the voting was to take place. A typical Mussulman procession which passed me was composed as follows: First came a military band and a small escort of infantry; next a carriage draped with Turkish flags, containing the voting urn and a few officials; lastly, a motley Mussulman crowd of voters and others, including imams, accompanied by theological students, pupils of the artillery and naval academies and numbers of happy schoolchildren, conspicuous among which was a band of tiny Moslem girls, wearing veils and waving miniature Turkish flags as they toddled along by the side of some tall gendarmes who brought up the rear of the procession. This and the other processions which I met moved through the crowded streets to the accompaniment of martial music, the singing of patriotic songs, occasional cheers for liberty and justice, and the waving of many flags. These were, indeed, the most good