In Constantinople the profession of satirist is evidently a dangerous trade. A Turkish paper recently published a cartoon which showed the women citizens of that country rising in a balloon by the expedient of throwing out bags of ballast labelled “Conscience,” “Honour,” and “Virtue.”

A Constantinople Court has just held that this was defamatory of Turkish women in general, with the result that editor, assistant editors, and cartoonist have all been fined and sent to prison for periods ranging from one month to five.

This fate seems a good deal harder than anything which English authors and journalists complain about; in this country if you can avoid libelling a specific individual there is not much risk of trouble for insulting a whole sex. Indeed, so long as your satire is reserved for the female sex, or a large portion of it, it might almost be said that a strong odour of sanctity applies to your performance.



If people could be put in prison for suggesting that modern woman was in league with the Evil One, half the Roman prelates in Ireland would be in gaol at this minute for their recent Lenten pronouncements on that subject.



“Cherchez la femme” would be a seditious utterance, and most of the satirists of history, from JUVENAL onwards, would have only escaped legal proceedings by dying before the law was tightened up, as in Turkey, to cover one of the most fashionable pastimes in the annals of literature. “It is a fine morning - let us go out and deplore the behaviour of women” has been a familiar masculine attitude down all the ages, and Court jester and Christian Fathers have been equally ready to indulge in their different variations on the same self-righteous theme.



If woman is not by this time an angel in human guise the lapse is not for lack of open correction, supplied by the monks in one age or the Menckens in another. As a matter of fact, there does not seem to be very much evidence that she has ever paid the least attention to all this vast body of recrimination or advice. But that is a discovery which has evidently still to be made by the courts of the newer Turkey.