Nationalist Notes

Turkish progress under the kinetic impulsion of President Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ghazi, the Victorious One, was so rapid, last week, as to dazzle if not perturb Occidentals.

P: The Grand National Assembly at Angora (new Turkish Capital) rushed through a law whereby infants born in Turkey after Jan. 1, 1929 to foreign parents will be considered Turkish subjects. Probably never before has an Asiatic state dared to enact a law so distasteful to Occidental Motherhood.

Little white-skinned Turks of the forthcoming crop will not be permitted to renounce their nationality until they come of age; and if they do so then will be banished automatically from Turkey.

P: Two new Turkish super-submarines, recently completed by a Dutch shipyard, were welcomed into Turkish waters amid pomp. The Ghazi, the Victorious One, stood at a window of the Dolma-Baghtche Palace on the Bosphorus, and watched through field glasses while the Turkish flag was hoisted aboard the submarines.

Greeks, who were defeated by Turks at the First & Second Battles of In-Eunu (1922) were vexed at the names of the two new Turkish submersibles, In-Eunu the First and In-Eunu the Second.

P:. President Kemal made official use of the ordinary European alphabet in writing Turkish, last week, and announced that this daring innovation will soon be made compulsory throughout Turkey.

"The widespread illiteracy of our population," he said shrewdly, "will make it far easier to introduce a new alphabet in Turkey than in a country where many people already know their letters. . . . Millions of Turks have abandoned the fez for the hat. . . . Thousands will find it even easier to adopt a new alphabet . . . [which] the millions will learn as their first."

P: The Victorious One, hero of the Young Turks' victorious war to oust the Sultan, has now caught the international itch for concluding peace treaties. Last week, he proclaimed, as President of Turkey, that Foreign Minister Dr. Tewfik Rushdi Bey had signed a treaty of "security and conciliation" with Italy and treaties of "security, conciliation, collaboration and active aid in case of attack" with Persia and Afghanistan.

The importance of these documents is incalculable. The first would seem to set at rest the many alarms of those who have thought that Italy had colonial designs on Turkey. The pacts with Persia and Afghanistan are fresh documentary evidence of the fact that there is now in formation a Middle East Entente.

P: Twenty Turkish policemen of Constantinople completed, last week, a course rendering them "proficient in the English language" and thus considerably more useful to the 17,000 tourists who annually visit the "City of Minars" and the Golden Horn.