THE PROBLEM OF TURKEY 215 



government's interference with their attempts to procure food 

 in a dry year. The trouble in that instance was primarily lack 

 of rain, and hence poor crops. Some of the coastal regions of 

 Turkey get a fairly abundant rainfall and are correspondingly 

 prosperous. Nowhere, however, except in a small area on the 

 Black Sea coast does much rain fall during the summer. In most 

 parts of the country no rain worth mentioning falls from the end 

 of May to the first of October. Often May and October have 

 little rain, while in bad years April and November may both be 

 dry. In mountainous regions like Dersim, which are at best 

 scarcely able to support their population, dry years bring great 

 distress. In the case under discussion the Turkish officials were 

 extremely foolish. They said that the Kurds were a bad lot and 

 needed a lesson. They failed to realize that the trouble with the 

 Kurds is not innate depravity, but the hunger of the moment and 

 the despair arising from century after century of unsuccessful 

 struggles against nature. Half a million dollars spent in furnish- 

 ing labor on public works instead of in paying for a military 

 expedition would have enabled those particular Kurds to buy five 

 times the food they needed, and would have kept them perfectly 

 quiet. The fundamental mistake is in assuming that the Kurds 

 are by nature robbers, a dangerous element to be sternly repressed. 

 The remedy lies in so adjusting matters that the evils of their 

 physical environment shall be neutralized. 



The Arabs are other members of the Turkish Empire who are 

 victims of similar circumstances. Before the Great War accus- 

 tomed men's ears to tales of distress and cruelty, I could have 

 harrowed your souls by telling how the people of the borders of 

 the Arabian Desert starved in the early seventies, a period of 

 unusual drought, while the Arabs plundered them unmercifully. 

 The Arabs pressed in from the desert by thousands. They were 

 hungry; their sheep and camels were weak and thin; the young 

 animals including the babies were dying for lack of milk; and 

 food of all kinds failed for the adults. Therefore the Arabs 



