• Author: Unknown
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 1 19 1916
• Tags:
• joke

A COSMOPOLITAN COUNTRY Constantinople and the neighboring regions have been the great scene of quick change cosmopolitanism in the past. "We naturally think of nationality as being a matter of birth and race." says Sir Charles Eliot, "but in the Levant it is regarded as a kind of privilege or convenience which may be acquired, lost or changed at will. No one sees anything incongruous in one brother being an Englishman, a second a Belgian and a third a Turkish subject. At the outbreak of the Turco-Greek war, Hellenic subjects were placed under certain disabilities which affected their business to a considerable extent. One of them came to me one day and asked whether he could not be made then and the e a British subject. He was distressed to find this was not possible; but a day or two afterward I met him and he was satisfied and smiling. He had become a Servian, and all was right again with him.