THE PROBLEM OF TURKEY 223 



ment of life's daily routine. This is no discredit to them. It is 

 merely a wise and often unconscious adjustment to the new 

 environment. I remember one who wished that he could work with 

 the untiring energy displayed by his wife and by others who had 

 just come from America. Two years later he said, "My wife, un- 

 fortunately, has learned that in this climate she cannot work so 

 steadily as at home." 



I might go on to cite hundreds of such cases. One has only to 

 study the climographs of an earlier chapter and the facts as to 

 health in New York to see that this response to the environment 

 of Turkey is exactly what would be expected. If people with the 

 finest inheritance, the best training, and the highest ideals thus find 

 themselves obliged to reduce their lives to a lower tempo in Turkey 

 than in more favored lands, what can we expect of the natives .J* 

 Malaria is rife among them, many are underfed, and those who 

 have plenty of food often do not have the ambition and energy to 

 learn proper ways of cooking it and of varying it. Any number 

 of small ailments prevail constantly, and do their share toward 

 keeping a large part of the people in a state of more or less 

 anasmia. Not that they are visibly sick, or that they would 

 acknowledge that they were less strong than the strongest. But 

 have you not noticed that just when people are most in danger of 

 breaking down they are loudest in their assertions that they are 

 all right? Have you not also noticed that when you are "under 

 the weather" you are apt to neglect all sorts of little things? In 

 Turkey people are under the weather for generation after genera- 

 tion ; this difficulty is aggravated by economic distress ; it is inten- 

 sified by the mixture of many races who fail to understand each 

 other partly because their lack of health and energy predispose 

 them to be self-centered and conservative. 



So Turkey, like all the other countries with which we have dealt, 

 seems to have a civilization corresponding to her physical environ- 

 ment. This does not mean that she is forever doomed to mis- 

 government, race hatred, and massacre. It does mean, however, 



