There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War, and
during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by
massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this daemoniac effort
after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of racial and
social types that has ever been placed at a single Government's mercy.
The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but you might search long
before you found one among its inhabitants. These Osmanlis are a
governing class, indigenous only in Constantinople and a few
neighbouring towns, but planted here and there, as officers and
officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of a clan of Turkish
nomads, recruited since the thirteenth century by converts, forced or
voluntary, from most of Christendom, and crossed with the blood of
slave-women from all the world. They are hardly a race. Tradition
fortified by inertia makes them what they are, and also their Turkish
language, which serves them for business of state and for a literature,
though not without an infusion of Persian and Arabic idioms said to
amount to 95 per cent. of the vocabulary[1].

This artificial language is hardly a link between Osmanli officialdom
and the Turkish peasantry of Anatolia, which speaks Turkish dialects
derived from tribes that drifted in, some as late as the Osmanlis, some
two centuries before. Nor has this Turkish-speaking peasantry much in
common with the Turkish nomads who still wander over the central
Anatolian steppe and have kept their blood pure; for the peasantry has
reverted physically to the native stock, which held Anatolia from time
immemorial and absorbs all newcomers that mingle with it on its soil.
Thus there are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, divided by
blood and vocation and social type; and even if we reckon all who speak
some form of Turkish as one group, they only amount to 30 or 40 per