The Turkish Language

1916

The Turkish language has been made obligatory by law for companies and corporations doing business in Turkey. For foreign companies this obligation is limited to their correspondence with the Turkish Government and to documents which they may use in dealing with the Turkish public. Companies are given until July, 1919, to comply with the new law.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 26, 1916, p. 6.

Ask Aid For Removal of Turks' Slave Marks

1920

Armenian Girl Captives Are Disgraced by Tattooed Faces

PRINCETON, N. J., Jan. 1. — Many Armenian women and girls who were stolen by Turks, Kurds and Tartars were tattooed by their abductors on their cheeks and foreheads. These unhappy women must bear the signs of their disgrace to their graves unless a scientific method of removing the tattoo marks is furnished.

Dr. Wilfred M. Post, of Princeton, N. J., returned recently from Asia Minor, where he served with the Near East Relief. He says many of the women were driven into rivers to drown, the most beautiful girls were reserved for Turkish harems, from which some escaped and some were rescued.

The officials of the Near East Relief have asked physicians who specialize in affections of the skin to inform them of a safe way of removing tattoo marks. Several prominent scientists have offered their services, among them Dr. George H. Washburn of Harvard, who served in the Medical corps of the United States Army.


Weight Straightens His Neck

1920

Then Sight Is Restored to Youth Injured at Football

NORMAN, Okla., Jan. 1. — John H. Merkle, a student in the University of Oklahoma, is rapidly recovering from injury received in a football game here, which dislocated his cervical vertebra and temporarily blinded him, by carrying a 10-pound weight around his neck. Merkle's vision returned as soon as his neck became straightened by the weight. Merkle, who is now in a Shawnee hospital, lives at Maud, Oklahoma.

Some Good About All Races

1900

"The Bright Side of Humanity," a new book by Dr. Edward Leigh Pell, is said to be the first serious attempt that has ever been made to present the characteristic noble traits of all races. In the preparation of his book Dr. Pell examined one thousand works of travel and although all of them set forth with considerable detail the vices and disagreeable traits of the people which they profess to describe, only two hundred dwelt at any length on their virtues. To supply the compensatory high lights in these dark pictures was a happy thought and must have been a pleasant task.


A Little of Everything

A Chicago tobacconist hands every cigarette purchaser a neighboring undertaker's card.

In the Black forest district of Germany are 1,400 master clockmakers and 6,000 workmen.

A church bell has an empty head and a long tongue, but it is discreet enough not to speak until tolled.

The sultan has forbidden the Turkish war department to use balloons or carrier-pigeons for army purposes.

A French naturalist asserts that nightingales devour the drones of a beehive, and never attack the workers.

A mint is to be established in Canada for the coinage of gold. Heretofore the coining of the metallic currency has been done in England.

An official map of Vesuvius on a scale of one in ten thousand has just been issued, being the first since 1876. A new plan in relief of the cone has also been made.

How to Deal With the Turks

1920

The Allied military demonstrations in Constantinople will be watched with keen attention, says the St. Louis Star, as it is a test, under extreme circumstances, of the theory that the Turks can best be controlled by leaving their capital in Europe. If the influence of the Allies in Constantinople restrains Turkish outrages in Asia Minor, the principal argument for leaving the Turks in their present capital will be justified. This, however, does not cover the situation.

Renewed outrages against the Armenians, coupled with defiance of the Allied police forces in Asia Minor, call for drastic restriction of Turkish power. The Turks should have no army and no armament. The covenant of the League of Nations provides for supervision by the league of sales of arms and munitions in "countries in which the control of this traffic is necessary in the common interest." Surely, Turkey, judged by its long record of massacres and unjustified wars, is such a country.

The one thought of the Allied powers, in settling with Turkey, should be to put an end, once for all, to the terrible conditions which have prevailed in the Near East since the Ottoman Turks broke out of their own Turnanian home nearly a thousand years ago. The Turks must be made impotent to carry on their policy of slavery and slaughter. The United States, while this problem is being settled, cannot legitimately stand aside and treat it as an affair of Europe. It is a world problem, and our concern.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 20, 1920, p. 6.