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Microeconomics (Acemoglu/Laibson/List)
Chapter 7 Perfect Competition and the Invisible Hand

7.1 Perfect Competition and Efficiency

1) A ________ is the price at which a trading partner is indifferent between making the trade and not
doing so.
A) market value
B) reservation value
C) shadow value
D) discounted value
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

2) Reservation value of a buyer reflects her ________.


A) willingness to pay for a good or service
B) trade-off between buying various goods and services
C) total utility from a good or service
D) total income
Answer: A
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

3) A buyer is willing to buy 10 units of a good at a maximum price of $10 per unit. The reservation value
of the buyer in this case is:
A) $1.
B) $10.
C) $20.
D) $100.
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

4) Reservation value of a seller reflects her ________.


A) willingness to pay for using a resource
B) marginal cost
C) marginal revenue
D) total cost
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

1
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
5) The marginal cost and total revenue of a firm are $5 and $275, respectively. The reservation value of the
seller in this case is ________.
A) $0
B) $5
C) $55
D) $275
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

6) A seller is willing to sell 5 units of a good at a minimum price of $1 per unit. The reservation value of
the seller in this case is:
A) $1.
B) $5.
C) $6.
D) $10.
Answer: A
Difficulty: Easy
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

7) The equilibrium price and quantity of a good under perfect competition are determined:
A) by the intersection of the market demand and total revenue curves.
B) by the intersection of the total revenue and total cost curves.
C) by the intersection of the market demand and market supply curves.
D) by the intersection of the market supply and total revenue curves.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

2
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
The following table displays the reservation values of eight buyers and eight sellers where each
individual wants to buy or sell a calculator.

Reservation Value Reservation Value


Number of Buyers of Buyers ($) Number of Sellers of Sellers ($)
1 20 1 2
2 17 2 5
3 16 3 6
4 14 4 8
5 12 5 12
6 9 6 15
7 6 7 18
8 2 8 20

8) Refer to the table above. If the market is perfectly competitive, the equilibrium price of calculators is:
A) $2.
B) $6.
C) $12.
D) $20.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

9) Refer to the table above. If the market is perfectly competitive, the equilibrium quantity of calculators
is:
A) 3 units.
B) 5 units.
C) 6 units.
D) 8 units.
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

10) Consumer surplus is the:


A) difference between the buyer's reservation value and the price he actually pays.
B) product of a buyer's reservation value and the price he actually pays.
C) sum of a buyer's reservation value and the price he actually pays.
D) ratio of a buyer's reservation value to the price he actually pays.
Answer: A
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Social Surplus

3
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
11) Producer surplus is the:
A) sum of a seller's reservation values and the price he finally receives.
B) difference between a seller's reservation value and the price he finally receives.
C) product of a seller's reservation value and the price he finally receives.
D) ratio of a seller's reservation value to the price he finally receives.
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Social Surplus

12) If a seller's reservation value for a good is $10 and the price at which the good is sold is $15, his
producer surplus is:
A) $25.
B) $150.
C) $1.5.
D) $5.
Answer: D
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

13) If a seller's marginal cost is $25, and the price at which the good is sold is $15, the producer surplus is
________.
A) -$10
B) $10
C) $15
D) $25
Answer: A
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

14) If a seller enjoys a producer surplus of $30 when he sells a good for $79, his reservation value for the
good is ________.
A) $30
B) $49
C) $79
D) $109
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

4
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
15) If a buyer's reservation value for a good is $15 and the price at which he purchases the good is $8, his
consumer surplus is:
A) $7.
B) $1.8.
C) -$7.
D) $120.
Answer: A
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

16) If a buyer enjoys a consumer surplus of $25 when he purchases a good for $50, his willingness to pay
for the good is ________.
A) $2
B) $25
C) $50
D) $75
Answer: D
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

17) When buyers and sellers optimize in a perfectly competitive market, ________.
A) social surplus is maximized
B) social surplus is minimized
C) only consumer surplus is maximized
D) only consumer surplus is minimized
Answer: A
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Social Surplus

18) Social surplus is:


A) the product of consumer surplus and producer surplus.
B) the consumer surplus minus producer surplus.
C) the ratio of consumer surplus to producer surplus.
D) the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus.
Answer: D
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Social Surplus

5
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
19) If the producer surplus in a market for a good is $36 and the consumer surplus in the market for the
same good is $9, the social surplus in the market is ________.
A) $4
B) $27
C) $45
D) $324
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

20) Suppose a market has only one seller and only one buyer of a good. The buyer has a reservation value
of $25 and the seller has a reservation value of $15. The market price of the good is determined at $20. If
they trade, the social surplus will be ________.
A) $10
B) $20
C) $40
D) $60
Answer: A
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

21) Suppose a market has only one seller and only one buyer of a good in the market. The buyer is willing
to pay $50 for the good and the seller is willing to accept $15. The market price of the good is determined
at $30. If they trade, the social surplus will be ________.
A) $15
B) $35
C) $45
D) $65
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

22) For social surplus to be maximized, the ________ buyers are actually making a purchase and the
________ sellers are selling the products.
A) lowest-value; highest-cost
B) highest-value; lowest-cost
C) highest-value; highest-cost
D) lowest-value; lowest-value
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Social Surplus

6
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
23) The total surplus in a market is represented by:
A) the area between the demand curve and the market price line.
B) the area between the supply curve and the market price line.
C) the area between the demand and supply curves and the price axis.
D) the area between the demand curve and the horizontal axis.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
Topic: Social Surplus

24) Jack is a prospective buyer of a commodity that Jill is offering to sell. Social surplus in this scenario
can be maximized:
A) when only Jack is optimizing.
B) when only Jill is optimizing.
C) when both Jack and Jill are optimizing.
D) when neither Jack nor Jill is optimizing.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

The following table displays the reservation values of buyers and sellers in the market for notebooks,
where each one either wants to buy or sell one notebook.

Reservation Value Reservation Value


Buyers of Buyers ($) Sellers of Sellers ($)
1 7 1 1
2 6 2 2
3 5 3 3
4 4 4 4
5 3 5 5
6 2 6 6
7 1 7 7

25) Refer to the table above. If the market for notebooks is perfectly competitive, the equilibrium price is:
A) $2.
B) $3.
C) $4.
D) $5.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

7
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
26) Refer to the table above. If the market for notebooks is perfectly competitive, the equilibrium quantity
is:
A) 2 units.
B) 3 units.
C) 4 units.
D) 5 units.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

27) Refer to the table above. If the market is perfectly competitive, what is Buyer 3's consumer surplus?
A) $0
B) -$1
C) $1
D) $2
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

28) Refer to the table above. What is Seller 3's producer surplus?
A) $1
B) $2
C) $3
D) $4
Answer: A
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

29) Refer to the table above. If only the two highest-value buyers and the two least-cost sellers engage in
trade, what is the social surplus?
A) $6
B) $10
C) $12
D) $20
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

8
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
30) Refer to the table above. If the six highest-value buyers and the six least-cost sellers engage in trade,
what is the social surplus?
A) $6
B) $8
C) $10
D) $12
Answer: A
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

31) Refer to the table above. When the price is ________ and the quantity is ________, social surplus is
maximized.
A) $8; 5 units
B) $6; 4 units
C) $4; 4 units
D) $2; 8 units
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

32) Refer to the table above. Maximum social surplus is:


A) $10.
B) $12.
C) $14.
D) $16.
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

9
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
The following figure illustrates the demand and supply of decorative light bulbs in a perfectly
competitive market.

33) Refer to the figure above. What is the equilibrium price and quantity of the light bulbs?
A) Equilibrium price = $25, Equilibrium quantity = 0 units
B) Equilibrium price = $25, Equilibrium quantity = 15 units
C) Equilibrium price = $15, Equilibrium quantity = 15 units
D) Equilibrium price = $5, Equilibrium quantity = 15 units
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

34) Refer to the figure above. What is the consumer surplus in the market?
A) $50
B) $75
C) $100
D) $225
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

35) Refer to the figure above. What is the producer surplus in the market?
A) $50
B) $75
C) $150
D) $200
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus
10
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
36) Refer to the figure above. What is the social surplus if the market is in equilibrium?
A) $50
B) $75
C) $100
D) $150
Answer: D
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

37) Refer to the figure above. What is the maximum possible social surplus?
A) $100
B) $150
C) $225
D) $375
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

38) The social surplus in a market is $50. If another economic agent enters the market such that the
marginal cost he incurs is $10 and the marginal benefit he receives from the trade is $5, then which of the
following statements is true?
A) The social surplus will remain the same.
B) The social surplus will increase by $5.
C) The social surplus will decrease by $5.
D) The social surplus will increase by $10.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

39) Which of the following statements is true of competitive market equilibrium?


A) The determination of equilibrium price and quantity is independent of the demand for goods.
B) Social surplus is minimized at the competitive equilibrium.
C) At the competitive equilibrium, there are no unexploited gains from trade.
D) A competitive equilibrium is determined only by a few large sellers in the market.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

11
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
40) In a competitive market equilibrium:
A) social surplus is minimized.
B) all the gains from trade are not realized.
C) there is Pareto efficiency.
D) all the firms earn positive economic profits.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

41) An outcome is Pareto efficient if:


A) an individual can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
B) benefits of the outcome are equally distributed among all the participants.
C) no individual can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
D) costs of the outcome are equally shared by all the participants.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

42) When an outcome is ________, social surplus is ________.


A) Pareto inefficient; maximized
B) Pareto efficient; maximized
C) Pareto efficient; minimized
D) Pareto inefficient; minimized
Answer: B
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

43) Which of the following statements is true of a perfectly competitive market?


A) At equilibrium, it is possible to make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
B) The equilibrium price in a competitive market efficiently allocates scarce resources to participants.
C) The equilibrium price is determined by a few large firms in the market.
D) The sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus is not maximized at the equilibrium.
Answer: B
Difficulty: Medium
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

44) The invisible hand suggests that:


A) individuals working for self-interest will eventually maximize the well-being of society.
B) equilibrium in a competitive market is determined independent of demand and supply.
C) government intervention is necessary to rectify market imperfections.
D) the price mechanism allocates resources only to the people with high income in the country.
Answer: A
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

12
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
45) $100 is to be divided among two individuals—Mary and Jenna. Which of the following allocations is
Pareto efficient?
A) Mary receives $45, and Jenna receives $45.
B) Mary receives $20, and Jenna receives $75.
C) Mary receives $1, and Jenna receives $99.
D) Mary receives $90, and Jenna receives $9.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

46) $20 is to be divided among two individuals—Gary and Jamie. Which of the following allocations is
NOT Pareto efficient?
A) Gary receives $1, and Jamie receives $19.
B) Gary receives $19, and Jamie receives $1.
C) Gary receives $8, and Jamie receives $9.
D) Gary receives $15, and Jamie receives $5.
Answer: C
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

47) What does the concept of "invisible hand" imply?


Answer: The "invisible hand" is an idea in economics that suggests that when all assumptions of a
perfectly competitive market are in place, the pursuit of individual self-interest promotes the well-being
of society as a whole, almost as if the individual is led by an invisible hand to do so. Thus, under perfect
competition, when individuals are working to maximize personal profits, they end up promoting social
interests.
Difficulty: Easy
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

48) Define reservation values. If a buyer of a product has a reservation value of $10, the seller of the
product has a reservation value of $3, and the equilibrium price of the product is determined at $5,
calculate the consumer surplus and the producer surplus.
Answer: A reservation value is the price at which a trading partner is indifferent between making the
trade and not doing so. For a buyer, this is the highest price he is willing to pay for a good or service. For
a seller, it is the lowest price he is willing to accept for a good or service.
Consumer surplus = $10 - $5 = $5
Producer surplus = $5 - $3 = $2
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Perfect Competition and Efficiency

13
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
49) The following figure shows the demand and supply of a good. Calculate the social surplus from the
following figure. What is the maximum possible social surplus in this market?

Answer: Social surplus refers to the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus.
In this figure, consumer surplus = $(1/2 × 4 × 5) = $10.
Producer surplus = $(1/2 × 4 × 5) = $10.
Social surplus = $10 + $10 = $20.
Since, in the figure, market price is determined at the point of intersection of demand and supply, it is a
free market economy that is in equilibrium. Since social surplus is maximized when a market is in
equilibrium, the maximum possible social surplus is $20.
Difficulty: Medium
AACSB: Application of Knowledge
Topic: Social Surplus

50) Define a Pareto efficient outcome. Does it ensure equity? Explain with an example.
Answer: An outcome is said to be Pareto efficient outcome if it is not possible to make someone better off
without making someone else worse off. Pareto efficiency does not ensure equity. For example, $100 is
divided between two individuals such that one individual receives $75 and the other individual receives
$25. This allocation is Pareto efficient as it is not possible to make an individual better off without making
the other worse off, but the allocation does not represent equity.
Difficulty: Medium
Topic: Pareto Efficiency

14
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
51) The following table displays the reservation values of 10 sellers and 10 buyers in a market for cameras
where each individual wants to buy or sell one camera.

Buyers Value ($) Sellers Value ($)


1 100 1 5
2 86 2 18
3 74 3 22
4 60 4 26
5 55 5 35
6 50 6 50
7 34 7 65
8 26 8 75
9 12 9 85
10 6 10 100

a) What is the equilibrium price and quantity of cameras?


b) What is the social surplus when four highest-value buyers trade with four lowest-value sellers?
c) What is the social surplus when eight highest-value buyers trade with eight lowest-value sellers?
d) What is the highest possible social surplus in the market? At what quantity does it occur?
Answer:
a) The equilibrium price is determined at $50 and the equilibrium quantity is 6 units. The equilibrium
quantity is 6 units since six buyers are willing to pay at least $50 for a camera, and six sellers are willing
to sell a camera for no less than $50.

b) Social surplus is the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus. These can be calculated as
shown in the table below.

Consumer Producer
Buyers Value ($) Surplus ($) Sellers Value ($) Surplus ($)
1 100 50 1 5 45
2 86 36 2 18 32
3 74 24 3 22 28
4 60 10 4 26 24
5 55 5 5 35 15
6 50 0 6 50 0
7 34 -16 7 65 -15
8 26 -24 8 75 -25
9 12 -38 9 85 -35
10 6 -44 10 100 -50

Social surplus when the four highest value buyers trade with the four lowest value sellers:
= $(50 + 45 + 36 + 32 + 24 + 28 + 10 + 24) = $249.

c) The social surplus when the eight highest value buyers trade with the eight lowest value sellers:
= 50 + 45 + 36 + 32 + 24 + 28 + 10 + 24 + 5 + 15 - 16 - 15 - 24 - 25 = $189.

15
Copyright © 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
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saline. Rocks of a volcanic character were often visible. There were
little evidences of life except here and there long droves of heavily
burdened donkeys and camels and occasional flocks and herds of
wandering Turkomans.
Trains of camels in the deserts of Asia and Africa have always had
a peculiar fascination for me. Like the llama trains of the Peruvian
and Bolivian Andes they seem to be specially adapted to their
environment and to the work which they are called upon to perform.
Before the invention of the steam engine both, in their sphere, were
all but indispensable—the sure-footed llama on dizzy mountain
heights, the thirst-resisting camel in torrid, interminable deserts.
Even since the appearance of the locomotive these useful animals
are apparently as much in demand as ever. For, in addition to
transporting merchandise, as formerly, where railroads do not exist,
they are still in constant use in delivering goods to such roads as are
already in operation.
In the region of which I am now speaking, one, at times, sees
only three or four camels at most; at others there are a hundred or
more, all loaded to the limit of endurance. But whenever they
appear in the gray, barren, undulating plain, they, with their drivers,
at once give life and color to the landscape which is else but a dull
study in monochrome. Their leader is usually a dirty, unkempt,
diminutive donkey—in marked contrast to the stately animals that
submissively follow him—which is frequently bestridden by a
somnolent Turk wearing a faded old fez and voluminous red
trousers, with his legs reaching almost to the ground. As the caravan
gradually approaches one hears the jingling of the bells of the light-
stepping donkey and the clanging of the larger bells of the heavy,
lurching camel. But we also presently discover that both donkey and
camels are decked with gaudy trappings adorned with beads and
cowrie shells. These, however, are not solely for ornament, as one
might suppose, but rather to avert the evil eye which, in the Near
East, is even more dreaded than it is in any part of southern Italy.
How the camel carries one back to patriarchal times, to times
even when the domesticated horse was known only in warfare! As a
long line of betasselled camels came near our train one day, they
seemed by their sneers and the lofty manner in which they held up
their heads to be conscious of their ancient lineage and to resent the
trespassing by the Bagdad Railway on what was long their exclusive
domain. But to judge by the general appearance of the country—the
old patched tents, the reed huts, the hovels of unbaked mud, the
peculiar garb of the people, the primitive methods of agriculture, the
simple manners and customs of the people—this part of Anatolia,
notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, is in almost the same
condition as it was when Joseph and his brethren tended their
father’s flocks in the land of Canaan.
If this part of Asia Minor was as arid and desolate in the days of
Godfrey de Bouillon and Barbarossa—and we have no reason to
believe it was materially different—we can easily realize what must
have been the trials and sufferings of the Crusaders during their long
march through “burning Phrygia” and inhospitable Lycaonia. Their
route was through a dry, sterile, and salty desert, a land of
tribulation and horror.[192] It was then, no wonder that, in view of
the perils and sufferings entailed by an inland expedition, the later
Crusaders preferred to make the journey from Europe to the Holy
Land by sea.
Terror [writes Michaud] opened to the pilgrims all the passages of
Mount Taurus. Throughout their triumphant march the Christians had
nothing to dread but famine, the heat of the climate and the badness
of the roads. They had particularly much to suffer in crossing a
mountain situated between Coxon and Marash which their historians
denominate, “The Mountain of the Devil.”[193]
So great, indeed, were the toils and dangers and disasters
experienced by the Crusaders before they reached the Holy City of
Jerusalem, that the brilliant French historian is moved to declare, “If
great national remembrances inspire us with the same enthusiasm, if
we entertain as strong a respect for the memory of our ancestors,
the Conquest of the Holy Land must be for us as glorious and
memorable an epoch as the war of Troy was for the people of
Greece.”[194] Again he avers, “When comparing these two
memorable wars and the poetical masterpieces that have celebrated
them, we cannot but think the subject of the Jerusalem Delivered is
more wonderful than that of the Iliad.”[195]
There are several passes through the Taurus, but by far the most
important of them is the famous one long known as the Pylæ
Ciliciæ, or Cilician Gates.[196] From time immemorial this celebrated
pass has been the gateway between Syria and Asia Minor, between
southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe. Assyrians, Hittites,
Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Saracens,
Crusaders passed through them. Asurbanipal, Cyrus the Great, and
Sapor I led their armies through their narrow defiles. Cyrus the
Younger and Xenophon pushed their way through them on their way
to fateful Cunaxa. Alexander, Cicero, Harun-al-Rashid led their
armies through this narrow passage. It was also traversed by St.
Paul, by hosts of the Crusaders and by pilgrims innumerable from
the earliest ages of the Church.
On our way across the Taurus we followed in the footsteps of
Alexander and the Crusaders as far as the Vale of Bozanti. Here the
Bagdad Railway diverges slightly eastward from the old military and
trade route which passes through the Cilician Gates. As we preferred
to follow the old historic route to passing through nearly eleven
miles of railway tunnels, we left the train at Bozanti Khan and
proceeded by carriage through the Cilician Gates to Tarsus.
We were well repaid for so doing, for we had, in consequence,
one of the most delightful mountain drives in the world. On each
side of the road were towering heights clothed with forests of pine
and other evergreens, while rising far above these was the sky-
piercing summit of Bulgar Dagh covered with a mantle of snow of
dazzling whiteness. Further on our way
The pass expands
Its strong jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,
And seems with its accumulated crags,
To overhang the world.

And, as if to give life and variety to the majestic scene, we saw


circling the fantastic peaks and hovering above the beetling crags in
quest of prey, a number of great bare-necked vultures, which
seemed to be fully as large as the lammergeier of the Alps and no
mean rivals of the condor of the Andes.
The narrow gorge known as the Cilician Gates answers perfectly
to Cicero’s appellation of Pylæ-Tauri, gateway of the Taurus. And it
corresponds almost equally well with Xenophon’s description of it
when he declares it “but broad enough for a chariot to pass with
great difficulty.” On both sides of the mountain torrent which rushes
along the historic roadway are lofty and almost vertical precipices
that could easily be so fortified as to convert it into a Thermopylæ,
where a handful of men could hold a large army at bay. It was
indeed by fortressing this pass that Mehemet Ali was long able, in
defiance of the power of the Turkish Sultan, to retain control of
Syria.
Shortly after emerging from the Pylæ Ciliciæ we catch our first
view of the famed Cilician Plain, the Cilicia Campestris, which
occupies so large a page in the history of this part of the world.
Through it we see coursing like silver bands the distant rivers of
familiar names—the Sarus, the Pyramus, and the Cydnus. The road
in the vicinity of the pass is fringed with forests of pine and plane
trees, under whose outstretched branches flows a leaping, laughing,
tuneful stream which is ever making the same gladsome music as it
did when St. Paul passed this way bearing the joyful tidings of the
Gospel to the receptive peoples of Asia Minor. But as we near the
plain we note a marked change in climate. Vegetation is not only
more luxuriant but is almost semi-tropical in character. The road is
bordered with laurel, bay, cedar, evergreen oak, wild fig, and wild
olive. There are thickets of myrtle and oleander draped with wild
vines and creepers, which greatly enhance the picturesqueness of
the enchanting scene.
It was along this road, embowered in all the verdure and bloom
of a semi-tropical climate, that the weary and footsore Crusaders
passed after their long and toilsome march through the burning
desert of Phrygia. Now that they had crossed the formidable Taurus,
the greatest barrier athwart their long line of march, and were at
last about to tread the sacred soil of the Holy Land, we can easily
imagine the joy with which they chanted their favorite hymns, the
enthusiasm with which they filled the air with their war cry, Dieu le
veult. Clad in polished armor, shining brightly in the Syrian sun, and
exultantly marching under their great banners, they form a
magnificent pageant, worthy of the chivalry of the Ages of Faith and
of the noble cause in which they have magnanimously pledged
fortune and life. And as the Christian host moves onward towards its
goal, “one pictures, above the lines of steel, the English leopards,
the lilies of France, the great sable eagle of the Empire and then the
other coats of the great houses of Europe—chevrons and fesses and
pales”—ever triumphantly approaching the Holy City until at last they
are privileged to “plant above the Holy Sepulchre the banner with
the five potent crosses, argent and or, unearthly, wonderful as
should be the arms of the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Still following in the footsteps of the Crusaders we finally, after
the most delightful of drives, arrived at the old city of Tarsus, the
birthplace of St. Paul the Apostle. This was the first city in which
Baldwin and Bohemond and the Tancred the Brave flew their colors
after crossing the Taurus. We had followed in their footsteps a great
part of the way from the legend-wrapped Bosphorus to the romantic
Cydnus—the Cydnus in which Alexander so imprudently bathed,
where Cleopatra met Anthony and where legend long had it that
Barbarossa lost his life. But the truth of history bids us declare that
this great German hero—in whose footsteps we had so closely
followed from his embarkation on the far-off Danube—perished not
in the waters of the Cydnus but in those of the Calycadnus, several
score miles to the northwest of the more famed Cilician stream. It
was then in the Calycadnus—the modern Gieuk Gu—that “perished
the noblest type of German kingship, the Kaiser Redbeard, of whom
history and legend have so much to tell.” The spot where he met his
fate was fabled to have been indicated long ages before by a rock
near the river’s source, which was said to bear the portentous words
Hic hominum maximus peribit—here shall perish the greatest of
men.
But although history had declared that the heroic Römischer
Kaiser was no more, his admiring subjects knew better. Like
Charlemagne, Desmond of Kilmallock, Sebastian I of Brazil,
Napoleon Bonaparte, and other worthies,[197] he still lives, but has
retired into strict seclusion till, in the fulness of time, “he shall come
again full twice as fair and rule over his people.” According to one
legend the monarch is fast asleep in the castle of Bordenstein, or in
the vaults of the old palace of Kaiserslautern. But according to
another legend, he is held by enchanted slumber under the
Kyffhauser mountain. All, however, agree that he sits
Taciturn, sombre, sedate and grave,

before a stone table “through which his fiery-red beard has grown
nearly to the floor, or around which it has coiled itself nearly three
times.” Here, like King Arthur, of whom it is written, “Arturus rex
quondam rexque futurus,” he rests until
In some dark day when Germany
Hath need of warriors such as he,
A voice to tell of her distress
Shall pierce the mountain’s deep recess—
Shall ring through the dim vaults and scare
The spectral ravens round his chair,
And from his trance the sleeper wake.
The solid mountain shall dispart,
The granite slab in splinters start,
(Responsive to those accents weird)
And loose the Kaiser’s shaggy beard.
Through all the startled air shall rise
The old Teutonic battle cries;
The horns of war that once could stir
The wild blood of the Berserker,
Shall fling their blare abroad, and then
The champion of his own Almain,
Shall Barbarossa come again.
CHAPTER IX
IN HISTORIC CILICIA CAMPESTRIS
Domes, minarets, their spiry heads that rear,
Mocking with gaudy hues the ruins near;
Dim crumbling colonnades and marble walls,
Rich columns, broken statutes, roofless halls;
Beauty, deformity, together thrown,
A maze of ruins, date, design unknown—
Such is the scene, the conquest Time hath won.
Nicolas Michel.

It is doubtful whether, in any part of the world, more history has


been condensed in less area than in the picturesque region formerly
called Cilicia. Roughly speaking, it comprised the triangle bordered
by the Mediterranean and the lofty ranges of the Taurus and Amanus
Mountains. Its rich alluvial plains, watered by the celebrated Cydnus
and Pyramus, Sarus, and Pinarus, early attracted a large population,
who found there not only a mild and serene climate but also a soil
that yielded in rare abundance the plants and fruits most useful to
their sustenance and comfort. But, although the economical value of
the Cilician Plain—called by Strabo Cilicia Campestris—was great, it
was rather the political and military importance of this country that
made it the prize of contending nations from the earliest dawn of
history.
In the days when Hittite and Assyrian fiercely contended for
universal empire—long
Ere Rome was built or smiled fair Athen’s charms

it was the highway between Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. It was the
royal road between Persia and Greece on which was heard the
martial tread of the armies of Xerxes, Cyrus, and Alexander.
Rameses II—the Napoleon of Egypt—and Asurbanipal—the Napoleon
of Assyria—led their victorious hosts along this road and, like the
warriors who had preceded them, found subsistence for their men in
the fertile valleys of the Pyramus and the Cydnus. It was also a field
of frequent sanguinary conflicts during the days of Pompey and
Cicero, of Mark Anthony and Zenobia, the rarely gifted but ill-fated
“Queen of the East.” It was a continued arena of strife during
protracted wars between the Byzantine Emperors and the Sassanian
Kings, between the Osmanlis and Timur and Jenghiz Khan, and, in
recent times, between the Sultan of Constantinople and his
ambitious and rebellious viceroy, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.
Three of the decisive battles of the world war were fought on the
Cilician Plain. It was on the banks of the Pinarus that Alexander won
his memorable victory over Darius—a victory that gave the
irresistible Macedonian the control of the vast region between the
Mediterranean and the Euphrates and paved the way for the brilliant
triumph at Arbela, which made him the master of the world’s
greatest continent. It was here that more than five hundred years
later Septimus Severus crushed his rival Pescennius Niger, when “the
troops of Europe asserted their usual ascendant over the effeminate
natives of Asia.” And it was on this same historic spot that Heraclius
defeated Chosroes and once more, in a most signal manner, showed
the superiority of the West over the East.
But in addition to its celebrity as the theater of contests for world
supremacy, Cilicia, like so many other regions we have described in
the preceding pages, is noted as a field of romance, of myths, and
legends innumerable.
Among the strange romances that still await the pen of novelist
and historian is that connected with the extraordinary life and deeds
of the Turkoman freebooter, Kutchuk Ali Uglu, who a century ago
had his stronghold in the mountain fastnesses near Issus. Here,
during forty years, he openly defied the authority of the Porte and
the Great Powers of Europe. With the audacity of a Fra Diavolo and
the cruelty and relentlessness of a Barbary corsair he ravaged the
surrounding country and plundered traveling merchants and the
grand annual caravan of pilgrims from Constantinople to Mecca
whenever they came within his reach.
I am not [he was wont to say] as other Darah Beys are—fellows
without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the King’s
highway;—I am content with what God sends me. I await his good
pleasure, and—Alhumlillah—God be praised—He never leaves me long
in want of anything.[198]

Among some of the most daring performances of this desperado


was the seizure of the master of an English vessel with a part of its
crew, who were cast into prison. A large ransom was demanded for
their release, but before this was forthcoming all but one perished.
Strange as it may now seem, the English government with all its
power was never able to obtain any satisfaction for this atrocious act
of violence.
Shortly afterwards, the dauntless robber took possession of a
richly laden French merchantman—which, through ignorance of the
locality, came too near his fortress—and after appropriating its
cargo, sank the vessel and sent the captain and crew to the French
Consul at Alexandretta. Protests against these high-handed
proceedings were made by all the consular authorities at Aleppo, but
without avail. To the vigorous remonstrance of the Dutch Consul,
Kutchuk Ali coolly and blandly replied:
My dear Friend, I am threatened with attacks from the four
quarters of the earth; I am without money; I am without means; and
the ever watchful providence of the Almighty sends me a vessel laden
with merchandise. Say, would you not in my place lay hold of it, or
not?
It was only a few months later that this same consul was arrested
and imprisoned by the audacious freebooter. And, notwithstanding
the cordial friendship which had long existed between the two men,
the ruthless marauder did not liberate his prisoner until he had
extorted from him a very large ransom.
And during the eight months’ incarceration of the hapless consul,
Kutchuk Ali—was it from shame for ill-treating an old friend?—never
once visited his hapless victim or admitted him to his presence. But,
to show the character of this singular brigand, he did not fail,
through his lieutenant, to send to his prisoner words of sympathy
and consolation.
Tell him [the captor said] that unfortunately my coffers were empty
when fate brought him into this territory; but let him not despair, God
is great and mindful of us. Such misfortunes are inseparable from the
fate of men of renown, and from the lot of all born to fill high
stations. Bid him be of good cheer; a similar doom has twice been
mine, and once during nine months in the condemned cell of Abdul
Rahman Pasha; but I never despaired of God’s mercy, and all came
right at last,—Alla Karim—God is bountiful.[199]

When one is told that Kutchuk Ali, during his forty years of a
desperado’s life, never had more than two hundred men, and
frequently a far less number, it seems incredible that he was so long
able to defy not only the Porte but even the greatest powers of
Europe. But we forget that the notorious Calabian bandit, Fra
Diavolo, during the same period and with a much smaller band of
outlaws, was wantonly perpetrating similar atrocities in southern
Italy. And it was only a few generations earlier that the notorious
Captain Kidd was roving the high seas in open defiance of the naval
power of the civilized world.
One of the most popular legends in Cilicia is that of the Seven
Sleepers. According to the Christian version they were seven
brothers who fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus during the
persecution of the Emperor Decius, and did not awake until the time
of Theodosius II—nearly two hundred years later. The
Mohammedans, however, contend that the cave in which this
preternatural event occurred was about ten miles northwest of
Tarsus. Because of the prominence the Prophet gives the legend in
the Koran, the Cilician cave has become among the Moslems a
favorite place of pilgrimage. Mohammed has, however, elaborated
the story by introducing the dog—Al Rakim—of the Seven Sleepers
and descanting on the care that Allah took of the bodies of the
sleepers during their long, miraculous sleep.[200]
But it is in classical legend and myth that Cilicia is specially rich. It
was near the mouth of the Pyramus, according to Homer, that
Bellerophon, after his fall from Pegasus,
Forsook by heaven, forsaking humankind,
Wide o’er the Aleian field he chose to stray,
A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way.

Mopsuestia, which was formerly one of the largest and most


flourishing cities of Cilicia, was fabled to have been founded during
the Trojan war by Mopsus, the son of Manto and Apollo, while
Adana, the most important commercial center on the Sarus and the
Bagdad Railway, owes its name, legend has it, to Adam, its fabulous
founder.
A notable feature of the history of Cilicia is the number of
crowned heads who died or found their last resting place within its
borders. Constantius, the son of Constantine, died of fever at
Mopsucrene, near Tarsus, while marching against his nephew and
rival, Julian the Apostate. It was to Tarsus that the embalmed body
of the Apostate Emperor, who had been transfixed by a Persian
javelin beyond the Tigris, was brought for burial. It was in Tarsus
that Maximinus, the last of the great persecutors of the Church,
preceding Constantine the Great, died in the greatest agony of a
frightful disease—a visitation, according to many, for his barbarous
persecutions of the Christians and for his horrible blasphemies
against their Lord and Savior. It was, we are informed by Strabo, at
Anchiale, the port of Tarsus, where were entombed the mortal
remains of the celebrated Assyrian ruler known to the Greeks as
Sardanapalus. On his monument was a stone statue beneath which
was the famous epitaph—attributed to the Assyrian monarch himself
—which, as rendered by Byron in his tragedy “Sardanapalus,” ran:
Sardanapalus,
The King and son of Ancyndaraxes
In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus.
Eat, drink and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.[201]
Asurbanipal, according to this inscription which was supposed to
express in a few words the guiding principles of this life, evidently
belonged to that class of Europeans who are seemingly becoming
daily more numerous of whom the poet speaks in the words:
Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna
Vix pueri credunt.[202]

The population of Cilicia, as might be expected from its having


been from time immemorial the great arena of the nations of the
Orient and the Occident, has always been of the most cosmopolitan
character. In ancient times Medes and Persians, Assyrians and
Babylonians, Scythians and Hittites foregathered here, sometimes
bent on the purpose of commerce but more frequently on the
prosecution of war and conquest. To-day we find here Syrians and
Arabians, Greeks and Armenians, Kurds and Ansaryii, Turkomans and
Osmanlis, and representatives from divers parts of Africa and
Europe. Was it this heterogeneous character of the Cilicians which
gave rise to their widespread reputation for perfidy and
untruthfulness and that led to the proverb Cilix haud facile verum
dicet?
Knowing the complex character of its inhabitants, one is not
surprised to learn that the gods and idols of the Cilicians were as
manifold as the people themselves and that their worship exhibited
all the promiscuity of the divers nations from whence they came.
Baal and Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, and Osiris had their altars alongside
those of Mars and Mercury, Zeus and Aphrodite. There was, indeed,
a time—just before the advent of the world’s Redeemer—when it
could be said that Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was, in very truth,
the pantheon of paganism.
During the zenith of its glory, Cilicia was one of the most densely
populated countries in the world. But it has long since so fallen from
its high estate that, like the lands of the Nile and the Euphrates, it is
a region of ruins. So great indeed have been the ravages of time and
warring mortals that “ruins of cities, evidently of an age after
Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day, astonish the
adventurous traveler by their magnificence and elegance.”[203]
Mopsuestia, which once counted two hundred thousand
inhabitants, was an archbishopric and for a time the capital of the
Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, now numbers less than a thousand.
Anazarbas, which was the home of the poet Oppian and Dioscorides
who, “during fifteen centuries was an undisputed authority in botany
and materia medica, has long since been level with the ground.” Nor
is this all. Of many places mentioned by Cicero, when he was
proconsul of Cilicia, even the sites are unknown.
Because of the strong appeal made by its legendary and historic
lore we lingered longer in Tarsus than in any other spot in the
Cilician plain. Like many other places we visited during our journey,
Tarsus is as rich in myth and legend as it is in literary and historical
associations. According to one myth, Tarsus was founded by
Perseus, the son of Jupiter and Danæ, while on his fabled expedition
against the Gorgons. Another has it that the city was so named
because Pegasus, the winged horse of Olympus, dropped there one
of his pinions.[204] Josephus, however, identifies it with the Tarshish
of the Old Testament, whence the ships of Hiram and Solomon
brought their treasures of tin, silver, and gold.[205]
From an inscription on the Black Obelisk of Salmanasar II, we
learn that Tarsus was captured by the Assyrians under Salmanasar
about the middle of the ninth century, B. C. It was thus in existence
several centuries before the mythical Romulus and Remus erected
on the Capitoline their sanctuary for homicides and runaway slaves,
and its foundation was probably laid before the legendary
introduction into Greece of the Phœnician alphabet by Cadmus when
he went in quest of Europa.
Centuries passed by and Tarsus became a great and flourishing
center of commerce and literary activity. While Paris—La Ville
Lumière—was as yet only a collection of mud huts on a little island in
the Seine, inhabited by the Gallic Parisii, and London was but “a
thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart”[206] and occupied by
half-savage, woad-stained Britons, Tarsus ranked as a center of
Greek thought and knowledge with the world-famed cities, Athens
and Alexandria.[207] Its schools and lecture rooms were frequented
by vast numbers of students from far and near, while its agora and
gymnasium, as in Athens in the days of Socrates, drew large
concourses of people, young and old, who assembled to discuss not
only the current news of the day, but also questions of literature,
science, and philosophy.
Although famed throughout the Roman Empire as a civitas libera
et mimunis—a capital and a free city—and as a great emporium of
eastern trade, its proudest boast was that it was a city of schools
and scholars. Here were found poets and orators of marked
eminence. Here were philosophers of many schools, Stoics and
Peripatetics, Platonists and Epicureans—all with their enthusiastic
followers and all seriously discussing the same problems which have
engaged the attention of thoughtful men from their time to our own.
In the long list of men produced by Tarsus, or who added luster
to its name as teacher of students, were the two Athenodori, one of
whom had been the tutor of Julius Cæsar and the other the friend of
Cato and the instructor of Augustus. These were Stoics. Among the
Academicians was Nestor, who was the preceptor of Marcellus, the
son of Octavia, sister of Augustus. Other eminent men of Tarsus,
mentioned by Strabo, were the philosophers, Archimedes and
Antipater, the latter of whom was highly praised by Cicero, and who,
next to Zeno, was considered as the most eminent of the Stoics.
There were also Strabo, the great geographer, the grammarians
Diodorus and Artemidorus, and the poets Dionysides and Aratus,
from whose poem, “Phænomena,” St. Paul quoted the pregnant
words, “For we too are His offspring,” in his epochal address to the
Athenians on the Areopagus.
According to Strabo, Rome was full of learned men from Tarsus, in
whose schools, as has been well said, was taught in its
completeness the whole circle of instruction, the systematic course
from which we get our word “encyclopædia.”[208]
But the flowering of so many ages of preparation in philosophy
and religion was the great “Apostle of the Gentiles.” The selection of
his birthplace seems to have been providential. Sir William Ramsay is
so convinced of this that he writes “that it was the one suitable place
that has been borne in on the present writer during long study of
the conditions of society and geographical environment of the
Cilician lands and cities.... Its peculiar suitability to educate and
mould the mind of him who should in due time make the religion of
the Jewish race intelligible to the Græco-Roman world, and raise
that world up to the moral level of the Hebrew people and the
spiritual level of ability to sympathize with the Hebrew religion in its
perfected stage, lay in the fact that Tarsus was the city whose
institutions best and most completely united the oriental and the
western character.... Not that even in Tarsus the union was perfect;
that was impossible so long as the religion of the two elements were
inharmonious and mutually hostile. But the Tarsian state was more
successful than any of the other of the great cities of that time in
producing an amalgamated society, in which the oriental and the
occidental spirit in union attained in some degree to a higher plain of
thought and action. In others the Greek spirit, which was always
anti-Semitic, was too strong and too resolutely bent on attaining
supremacy and crushing out all opposition. In Tarsus the Greek
qualities and powers were used and guided by a society which was
on the whole more Asiatic in character.”[209]
In Tarsus the future apostle came into close contact with the
greatest teachers and scholars of his time, and was thus prepared to
enter the intellectual arena with the keenest minds of Greece and
Rome. Being, as he could proudly boast, “a Roman of no mean city,”
as well as a disciple of Gamaliel, one of the seven wise men of the
Jews, he was peculiarly fitted to preach the truths of the Gospel not
only to his own people but also to the much greater world of the
Gentiles.
Never was a more important or a more far-reaching mission
entrusted to mortal man. It is not too much to say that no one of his
time was better equipped for it than the tent maker of Tarsus.
Wherever he could secure a hearing for his marvelous message he
was sure to go—to the synagogue, to the agora, to the courts of
governors and consuls. Learned in the Law and the Prophets, he was
a match for the ablest teachers of Israel. Familiar with the literature
and philosophy of the pagan world, he spoke as one having
authority before the “Men of Athens” and the representatives of the
Cæsars. Thanks to the opportunities which he enjoyed in his youth
of associating with the wise and learned men of Tarsus and to his
thorough acquaintance with the highest forms of Greek culture, he
was able, through his quick intelligence and his ardent love of souls,
“to recognize and sympathize with the strivings of those who, living
in the times of ignorance, were yet seeking after God, ‘if haply they
might feel after Him and find Him,’ and to read in their aspirations
after a higher life the work of the law written in the hearts of all
men.”[210]
As one wanders through the narrow and squalid streets of
modern Tarsus—a city of less than twenty thousand inhabitants—
one finds no vestige whatever of its former splendor. But few ruins
remain, the most conspicuous of which is the concrete foundation of
a Roman structure popularly regarded as the tomb of the cynical
voluptuary, Sardanapalus. No tradition indicates the house of the
Apostle of the Gentiles or points to any church dedicated to his
memory. The banks of the silt-filled Cydnus are lonely and desolate.
Owing to the neglected condition of the river channel, no white-
winged ships are here visible, as of yore, laden with the treasures of
foreign lands. And yet it was up this now abandoned stream that
Cleopatra sailed in her gorgeous barge when she came to answer
the challenge of Mark Anthony. How, by her surpassing address, she
led captive the great triumvir is admirably described by Shakespeare,
who, following Plutarch, paints the famous picture of her entrance
into Tarsus, which was then in the dazzling splendor of oriental
magnificence:
The barge she sat in, like a burnisht throne,
Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick.
With them the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke
And made the water which they beat, to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person
It beggared all description, she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colored fans whose wind did seem,
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

The old capital of Cilicia is, of truth, a city of a wonderful historic


past. But among all her proud memories those which have made her
best known throughout the ages and which will endure the longest
are not those of her abounding wealth and luxury, her superb
monuments and palaces and temples, long in ruins; not those that
clustered around her poets and philosophers and made her a
favored sanctuary of the Muses; not those of her schools and
gymnasia and her one-time eminence as the rival of Athens and
Alexandria as the home of learning and culture; not those of Persian
satraps and Roman proconsuls who here lived as the famed
representatives of imperial authority; not those awakened by the
presence within her gates of an Asurbanipal, an Alexander, or a
Cicero; not those associated with the love-enmeshed Mark Anthony
and the fateful “Siren of the Nile,” who both perished the ignoble
victims of a debasing passion and a foiled ambition. No; that which
has rendered her immortal is that she was the birthplace of a poor
tent maker who was disowned by his own family because he became
the bond servant of the Crucified, to whom he bore witness from
Jerusalem to Rome; of one who, while preaching the good tidings of
the Gospel, toiled night and day lest he should “be chargeable to any
one”; one who, while preaching the Kingdom of God, was accused
by the Thessalonian Jews of “turning the world upside down”;[211]
one who, during his long and fruitful apostolate and his almost
superhuman labors in the service of his Master, gloried in
persecution and was the frequent victim of stripes and chains and
imprisonment; one who was the fearless teacher and the strong
supporter of the infant Church, and whose matchless Epistles have,
during nineteen centuries, been the guide of doctors and professors;
one who wrote his own epitaph when he declared “To me to live is
Christ, and to die is gain,” and who, in the capital of the Cæsars,
won an Apostle’s exceeding great reward—a martyr’s crown; one
whom his contemporaries knew as Saul, otherwise Paul,[212] of
Tarsus.
While in Cilicia I made a special effort to ascertain the truth
regarding the Armenian massacre that so stirred Europe and
America to horror in 1909. I had long been convinced that most of
the reports circulated respecting Turkish atrocities in Cilicia, like the
reports disseminated throughout the world regarding other similar
atrocities so frequently ascribed to the Turks, were ex parte accounts
of what had actually occurred and that most, if not all, of them were
greatly exaggerated. And recalling the activities since 1885 of
Armenian revolutionists, many of them inspired by Russian Nihilist
propaganda, the conviction grew that in probably the majority of
massacres in Asia Minor, as well as in that of Constantinople in 1896,
“the Armenian revolutionaries, by their riotous action, had put
themselves and their innocent countrymen outside the law.” As the
result of my investigations I am now satisfied that my previous views
were not without foundation.
The massacre in Cilicia—organized, it was averred, by the Moslem
Jews of Salonica—surpassed in frightfulness any that had taken
place during Abdul-Hamid’s long and troubled reign. When,
therefore, one understands the origin of the Cilician massacre, one
may safely conjecture the cause of most, if not all, of the others in
Turkey which have so shocked the world during the last four
decades.
But, in a matter of such import as the one under consideration, I
prefer to give the views of those who visited Cilicia when the terrors
of the great massacre in Adana were still fresh in the memory of
everyone, or who by long residence in Armenia are well acquainted
with its people and are thoroughly familiar with the measures to
which Armenians resort in order to achieve their independence of
the Ottoman Empire.
Many influences [writes an English traveler who had exceptional
opportunities for studying the question and who is well disposed
towards the Armenians] went to the making of the (Cilician)
massacre, some more or less, obscure, as the part taken in planning it
by the Turkish Jews of Salonika and others belonging to the deeper
causes of faith and race which ever underlie these horrible affairs. But
some were local and exhibited the inconceivable unwisdom which
Armenians so often display in their larger dealings with Moslems.
Cilicia [known during the Crusades as Lesser Armenia] is a district
closely connected with Armenian history and independence; and here,
in the sudden period of liberty which followed the downfall of Abdul-
Hamid, Armenians gave unrestrained vent to their aspirations. Their
clubs and meeting-places were loud with boastings of what was soon
to follow. Post cards were printed showing a map of the future
Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and circulated through the Ottoman post.
Armenian nationalists marched in procession in the streets bearing
flags purporting to be the flag of Lesser Armenia come to life again.
The name of the future king was bandied about, no aloof nebulous
personage, but, it is said, a well-known Armenian land owner of the
Cilician plain, held in peculiar disfavor by the Moslems. Giving a fuller
meaning to these matters was the steady assertion that an Armenian
army gathering in the mountains by Hajin and Zeitun—an army of
rumor like the legendary Royalist Army of Jales which terrorized
revolutionary France—would presently march upon Adana and set up
an Armenian kingdom again.
Sober Armenians of Cilicia tell you now that these proceedings
were folly, the work of revolutionary societies and hot-heads and that
the mass of the Armenian population held aloof. But there can be no
doubt that the movement was approved and supported by many, and
intended to involve the whole race; that it had in fact, got beyond the
control both of those who desired to go more slowly and those who
disapproved of it altogether.[213]
What is here said of the hot-brained revolutionaries of Lesser
Armenia can with even greater truth be affirmed of their seditious
compatriots of Greater Armenia. For those who know them best do
not hesitate to declare that their lurid accounts of frequent and
inevitably recurrent atrocities in certain parts of Asia Minor are to be
interpreted in the same way as those which were first published
regarding the horrors of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909,
and of Constantinople in 1896.[214] We get only one-sided reports
respecting them, which reports, if not glaringly exaggerated, are in
nearly all instances in severest condemnation of the “bloodthirsty”
Turk.
No one probably has a more accurate knowledge of Turkey and
her people or has made a more thoughtful study of the Armenian
Question than has the noted traveler and Orientalist, David G.
Hogarth, sometime fellow in the University of Oxford. With an
experience of several years in Armenia, he frankly declares, writing
of the Armenian Question:
So far as I understand this vexed matter, the source of the graver
trouble is the presence in the heart of Armenia of the defiant Kurdish
race which raids the villages where the flocks are fattest and the
women most fair, now cutting an Armenian’s throat, now leaguing
with him in a war on a hostile tribe and resisting in common the
troops sent up to restore the Sultan’s peace. Whatever the Kurd does
is done for the sake neither of Crescent nor Cross, for he bears
neither one emblem nor the other in his heart, but just because he is
Ishmael, his hand is against every man who has aught to lose.
The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for
plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in
the Ottoman side did he stand alone ... but behind the Armenian
secret societies—and there are few Armenians who have not
committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies
at some period of their lives—it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd
the Russian; or, looking west, it espies, through the ceaseless sporadic
propaganda of the agitators, Exeter Hall and the Armenian
Committees. The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and
we sympathize the more because he represses, and so the vicious
circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress?
Does he, as administrator, oppress? So far we have heard one version
only, one party to this suit with its stories of outrage and echoing
through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the
accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of
misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the
Moslem.
If the Kurdish Question could be settled by a vigorous Marshal, and
the Porte secured against irresponsible European support of sedition, I
believe that the Armenians would not have much more to complain of,
like the Athenian allies of old, than the fact of subjection—a fact, be it
noted, of very long standing; for the Turk rules by right of five
hundred years’ possession, and before his day the Kurd, the
Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman, preceded each other
as over-lords of Greater Armenia to the misty days of the first
Tigranes. The Turk claims certain rights in this matter—the right to
safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets’
nests as Zeitun which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of
the Eastern Taurus, the right to remain dominant by all means not
outrageous.
I see no question at issue but this of outrage. For the rest there is
but academic sympathy with aspiring nationalisms or subject religion,
sympathy not over cogent in the mouths of those who have won and
kept so much of the world as we: Arria must draw the dagger reeking
from her own breast before she can hand it with any conviction to
Pætus.[215]

To speak in this fashion of the Armenians is more painful to me


than I can express. From my youth I have sympathized with them in
their great sufferings and, like most other people who depended on
one-sided information, I attributed all their misfortunes to the much
maligned and much calumniated Turks. Were the Armenians raided
and maltreated by the lawless and murderous Kurds, who have been
responsible for the greater part of the crimes which have been
imputed to the Osmanlis? A sensational report was at once flashed
over the world of a great massacre in Asia Minor perpetrated by the
fanatical and fiendish Turk. Were they victims of Russian intrigue and
aggression, driven from their homes and forcibly separated from
their families? Again it was the Turk that was at the bottom of it all.
Did they suffer reprisals for seditious outbreaks of plotting
Huntchagists and revolutionary Armenians of foreign extraction? Still
again the hue and cry was raised in Europe and America that the
soulless Turk, always the Turk, only the Turk, was the guilty one.
Armenian agitators, Armenian jacks-in-office, Armenian revolutionary
committees provoking the Turks to retaliate on their offenders in
order to force the intervention of the Great Powers[216]—these
political mischief-makers go scot-free while the ever vilified Osmanli
is pilloried before the world as a monster of iniquity and a demon
incarnate.
The Anatolian Halil Halid, who was born and bred in Asia Minor
and who spent many years in England, commenting on the matters
under consideration, pertinently asks, “Did the humanitarian British
public know these things? No; it does not care to know anything
which might be favorable to the Turks. Have the political journals of
this country—Britain—mentioned the facts I have stated? Of course
not, because—to speak plainly—they know that in the Armenian pie
there were the fingers of some of their own politicians.”[217] And
those that are well informed know the reason of Britain’s attitude
toward Turkey, for they know that “since 1829, when the Greeks
obtained their independence, England’s Near East policy has been
remorselessly aimed at the demolition of the Turkish Empire and the
destruction of Ottoman sovereignty.”
Does France, the first nation of Europe to form an alliance with
the sublime Porte, know these things? She does, but, at the present
time, it suits her purpose to feign ignorance of them and to follow
the policy of England in her dealings with those whom she has
professed to be her friends and allies since the days of Francis I.
With a volte-face worthy of a politician she does not even allow a
favorite Academician, Pierre Loti—who knows the Turks better
probably than any man in France—to make a statement in their
favor, without censoring it, for fear he will reflect on the course of
the present government.
Does our own country, whose people are supposed to be always
on the side of justice and fair play, know the truth about the Turks
and Armenians in Asia Minor? Not one in a hundred; not one in a
thousand. The reason is simple. They have heard only one side of
the Armenian question, and, in most cases, are quite unwilling even
to hear anything to the advantage of the long-defamed Turks. With
most of our people the case of the Turks has been prejudged and
thrown out of court. And when one who has made a thorough study
of conditions in Asia Minor writes that “the most part of the
peasantry are men of peace, needing no military force to coerce
them, giving little occasion to the scanty police and observing a Pax
Anatolica for religion’s sake,”[218] he gives most of our people, who
should have an open mind, a distinct shock, but does not change in
the least their life-long prejudices. And when the same well-informed
writer declares that “Aliens, Greek, Armenian, Circassian thrust
him”—the Turk—“on one side and take his little parcel of land by
fraud or force”[219] he is suspected of being a special pleader and
his testimony is rejected as worthless.
But it may be said that I too am a special pleader for the Turk.
Nothing is farther from my intention. My sole desire is to make
known the truth as I have found it, and I have found that it is not all
on the side of the Armenians. “The Turk’s patience is almost
inexhaustible, but when you attack his women and children his
anger is aroused and nothing on earth can control it.”[220] Then, like
all other races of mankind, when stirred by religious or political
fanaticism or goaded on by domestic sedition and foreign intrigue,
the Turks also resort to reprisals and massacres that startle the
world. It may, however, be questioned whether in all their history the
Turks have perpetrated such refined atrocities as characterized the
Reign of Terror in France, Russia dragonades in Poland, Serbian and
Bulgarian savagery in the Balkans, unprovoked deeds of violence
instigated by Armenian revolutionists in Asia Minor. But of all the
people involved in these unspeakable outrages the Turk is the only
one who is not pardoned. Why not? He has never been granted a
fair hearing before the great tribunal of humanity.
From the foregoing it is evident that the Armenian Question will
not be settled so long as Armenian agitators are allowed to sow with
impunity the seeds of sedition in Asia Minor, or so long as they are
abetted by European nations whose manifest goal is the partition of
the Turkish Empire.[221] It is also evident that, so long as present
conditions persist, sporadic massacres like those provoked by the
Armenians in Cilicia and Constantinople are inevitable. These
conditions involve also the greater and more important Turkish
Question, or, speaking broadly, the Mussulman Question. The Great
Powers cannot, without grave consequences, treat Turkey as a
pariah nation. This the ever-increasing number of adherents of the
Prophet will not tolerate. The two hundred millions of the Faithful
are, be it remembered, the chief factors in the Near Eastern
Question, which can never be settled so long as the Moslems are not
accorded fair play in the arena of nations. The present schemes of
exploitation and conquest in Mohammedan lands now being
executed by the Great Powers can, in the long run, have but one
result—and that in spite of all peace treaties and leagues of nations
—the result of still farther separating the Cross and the Crescent and
of strengthening the barriers that have existed between the East and
the West since Greek battled with Trojan on the Plain of Troy.
As we wandered through the suburbs of Tarsus, made fragrant by
the inviting gardens and orchards of lemon and orange, we were
deeply impressed with the possibilities of the exceptionally rich
alluvial soil of the Cilician Plain. Having all the fertility of the Nile it
should, if drained, irrigated, and scientifically farmed, sustain a
population even greater than that which inhabited it in the days of
Pompey and Trajan. In soil and climate it is as favorable for the
production of cotton and sugar cane as Texas or Louisiana, while in
cereals and fruits of many kinds it yields as large crops as the most
favored districts of France or Germany.
But irrigation is needed near the foothills of the surrounding
mountains and adequate drainage is required near the mouths of
the four chief rivers that bring fertility to the plain. For, as it is now, a
great part of the land bordering the Mediterranean is covered with
swamps like that described by Ovid in his beautiful story of Philemon
and Baucis:
Haud procul hinc stagnum, tellus habitabilis olim,
Nunc celebres mergis fulicisque palustribus undæ.[222]

During the past few decades a great change has been made for
the better, as is attested by the large number of American
agricultural implements which are now found throughout the plain
and the hundreds of ginning machines, looms, and thousands of
spindles—mostly from England—which are seen in the cotton
factories of Tarsus and Adana. But, although a great advance has
been made over the condition which obtained a third of a century
ago, there is yet vast room for improvement. When the Ottoman
Government shall awaken to the necessity of conserving its natural
resources, when it shall systematically reforest the territory whose
once precious woodlands have been so sadly despoiled, and shall
duly drain the vast swamps which have been formed by the neglect
of its treasure-giving rivers, Cilicia Campestris will again be worthy of
the name which legend tells us it once bore—Garden of Eden.
As it is now, the whole extent of Cilicia from the Taurus to the
Amanus and from the mouth of the Cydnus to the headwaters of the
Pyramus is chiefly remarkable for ruins of cities and the sites of
towns whose very names are forgotten. Everywhere on the plain and
on the girdling foothills, one will see crumbling fortresses built by
Genoese and Venetians; moss-covered strongholds of Saracens and
Crusaders; Corinthian columns and marble colonnades, arches, and
vaulted roofs of Christian churches; reminders of mediæval warfare
and of days when this historic land was swept by inundations of
barbarian hordes, who destroyed by fire and sword the arts and
labors which were once the pride of western Asia. Everywhere one
observes fragmentary remains of Roman bridges and arches, of
aqueducts and causeways, of Greek altars attributed to Alexander to
commemorate his victory over the Persians; dilapidated walls and
towers and sepulchral grottoes with an occasional Greek or Arabic
inscription to mark the sites of Corycus, Pompeiopolis, and Anazarba
—those cities of renown, where their inhabitants could quietly rest
under their vines and fig trees free from the incursions of predatory
Cliteans and Tibareni and barbarians of Hun and Scithian savagery,
who spread terror and devastation wherever they could gratify their
lust of cruelty or plunder. It was the boast of the Mongols that so
complete was their work of “extirpation and erasure” of certain
cities, where they had wreaked their full fury of rapine and murder,
“that horses might run without stumbling over the ground where
they had once stood.”[223] Judging by the calamities that have been
inflicted on the once populous cities of Cilicia one would say that
they were, in the expressive words of St. Prosper of Aquitaine,
depredatione vastatœ—ravaged by depredations as ruthless as those
that ever characterized the frightful irruptions of Timur or Jenghiz
Khan.
This indiscriminate destruction of centers of culture and marts of
commerce is often attributed to the Turks. But, as we have already
seen, the Turks—I refer especially to the Osmanlis—who have been
the rulers of the Ottoman Empire for more than five hundred years,
were not like the Mongols and Tartars, a nation of raiders, but a
nation of colonizers and empire builders. Their object, therefore, was
not to destroy but to construct and develop. Those who make this
charge, which is in great measure gratuitous, forget the wholesale
destruction of the hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan, not to speak of
other raiders, and lose sight of the fact that some of the most
famous cities of the East were reduced to ashes by the armies of
Greece and Rome more than a thousand years before the
appearance of the armies of the Ottoman conquerors in Syria,
Greece, and Ionia. Thus, to mention only a few instances, it was
Alexander the Great who destroyed Halicarnasus, the birthplace of
the historians Herodotus and Dionysius. Here stood the magnificent
tomb of Mausolus, classed by the ancients among the seven
wonders of the world, the ruins of which were in 1402 used by the
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem as a quarry for building their
castles. It was the Roman general Mummius who brought ruin to the
famous city of Corinth. This was, in truth, rebuilt by Julius Cæsar,
but only to be destroyed again, at a much later period, by the
Greeks themselves. It was the Emperor Aurelian who doomed to
destruction Palmyra, the magnificent capital of Zenobia, almost
during the heyday of its architectural splendor and commercial
prosperity. It was the Goths who demolished the temple of Diana at
Ephesus, another of the world’s wonders, while the city itself was in
ruins even before the advent of the devastating Timur. But it was
Timur who razed Sardis, the capital of Crœsus, whose name has
ever been a synonym of untold wealth. It was Malik al-Ashraf, ruler
of Egypt and Syria, who destroyed the famed city of Tyre after its
long and eventful history which antedated the reigns of Hiram and
Solomon.
Moreover, for thousands of years before the advent of the
Osmanlis in western Asia there was at work an agency of destruction
that is usually quite disregarded by those who are so propense to
impute to the “Unspeakable Turk” the heaps of ruins which
overspread a large part of the great Ottoman Empire—an agency
whose power of annihilation is incomparably greater than ever was
that of Hun or Mongol. This is the earthquake. From the dawn of
history this irresistible power has been in action in nearly all the
countries bordering the Mediterranean, and has, times without
number, exhibited its relentless fury from Cilicia to Sicily and from
Egypt to Dalmatia. In Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor,[224] and Greece
whole cities were subverted. In the reign of Valens and Valentinian
the greater part of the Roman world was shaken by seismic
disturbances of the most appalling violence. Time and again the
massive walls of Constantinople, its palaces, churches, and
monasteries crumbled under the earth’s paroxysmal movements,
and the extent of the disaster inflicted was beyond computation. At
Cyzicus a temple which its builders fondly hoped would be as stable
and as durable as the pyramids was, in an instant, leveled with the
ground by one of those periodical earth shocks that have visited Asia
Minor from time immemorial.
In the destructive earthquake of 365 A. D., no fewer than fifty
thousand persons lost their lives in Alexandria. But probably no city
in the world has suffered more from seismic vibrations than Antioch,
which is near the southern border of Cilicia. Here in the terrific
earthquake of 526 A. D., the loss of life totaled a full quarter of a
million people. During the celebration of a public festival in Greece,
at which a vast multitude had assembled, “the whole population was
swallowed up in the midst of the ceremonies.” It was during this
period of widespread catastrophe in Greece that “the ravages of
earthquakes began to figure in history as an important cause of the
impoverished and declining condition of the country.”[225]
The same causes that led to the economic and social decline of
Greece operated with equally dire results in Asia Minor and Syria and
Palestine. When, therefore, we contemplate the countless ruins of
once famous cities, that are so conspicuous in a great part of Greece
and Turkey in Asia, let us assign them to their real causes—not “the
ravaging Turks,” but the devastating Huns and Goths, Tartars and
Mongols, Persians and Saracens, and the blind and convulsive forces
of nature.
It is far from my purpose to excuse the Osmanlis from any of the
crimes they have perpetrated against civilization. But the foregoing
paragraphs evince that their part in the destruction of the proud
cities and monuments—magnificent centers of culture and
commerce—of the ancient world has been greatly exaggerated.
Their great sin against humanity, at least for generations past, has
been one of omission rather than commission.[226] It has consisted
—I speak of the ruling classes—in their inefficient government,
which has given little or no encouragement to trade or industry;
which has neglected roads and bridges, making interior
communication difficult and often impossible; which has failed to
develop the vast resources of a country to which a beneficent nature
has been rarely prodigal; which has oppressed and trodden down a
laborious and long-suffering peasantry, than which there is no better
in the world; which has failed to provide for the education of the

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