Greece and the Eastern Question

THE eyes of all the world are now turned toward the Greeks. Among the great peoples of Europe they are a feeble folk, the mere remnant of an ancient greatness. In despite of the practical judgment of those who are wise after the wisdom of this world, and in defiance of the restraint of the strong, they have entered their protest against a wrong to their race and to humanity, and have registered their self-assertion, even at the hazard of war and in the face of tremendous odds. The little Greek nation, like a tender shoot sprung up from the root of a grand old tree long since hewn down, had encouraged the hopes of a new life; but practical arboriculture is pitiless of sentiment. In the court of worldly wisdom, sentiment and patriotism find no other sympathy than that the Theban elders meted out to Antigone and her impulse of duty: “ For now the light of hope had shone above the last root of Œdipus’s house, but now again the bloody pruning-knife of the nether gods slashes it down, —yea, folly of word and frenzy of mind.” ¹

The practical politician and the practical diplomat are of the same household of faith. The one abhors the division of parties on the basis of principle ; the other abhors the adjustment of national boundaries to sentiments of race, or language, or religion. Austria, built out of a congeries of race and language fragments, is the diplomat’s ideal of a nation. The partition of Poland is a specimen of his handiwork. The absorption of Crete into Greece, on the score of community of blood, language, and religion, is a good representative of the things which he does not like to have happen. In this particular case, too, the precedent would be an unusually bad one. If Crete goes to Greece because it is Greek, why not Cyprus, why not Chios and Samos, why not Epirus, why not the coast of Macedonia ? And where would be the end ? The balance of power is a business arrangement, and sentiment must always yield to business principles.

Look now at the situation as the Greek sees it. He has not ranged abroad like a knight in the saddle, seeking occasion for the exercise of sentiment. The necessity has come to his doors. Every few years, for the past three decades, tidings have reached him from Crete of oppression, disorder, and massacre, — tidings brought by the unhappy victims themselves. Refugees have swarmed on his coasts, — this year to the number of twenty thousand. The government has been obliged to feed and shelter them. At last it became too much for flesh and blood to stand. That matters came to such a pass is the fault, not of Greece, but of the six Great Powers of Europe who have guaranteed to the Turk the undisturbed right of misgovernment. The utter failure of all attempts to check the Turk in his purpose of exterminating the Armenians spread far and wide among the Greeks of European and Asiatic Turkey the conviction that they were destined to be next in turn. The instinct of self-preservation became aroused throughout the little race. King George is a sagacious man, by no means given to quixotic enterprises, but, as the leader of a people, he could not afford longer to withstand what had become the people’s fixed conviction of duty to themselves and their race. Outmatched they were, of course, on every hand. It was sentimental politics, indeed, but at the base were the sentiment of kinship of blood and kinship of faith, and the instinct of self-preservation. Be it right or wrong, be it wisely or in folly, sentiment at last burst through the barriers by which diplomatic politics had for two generations held it in restraint, and in defiance of the consolidated power of Europe the expedition of rescue set forth for Crete.

Once it was upon the seas, the Eastern Question was reopened. And when the Eastern Question is reopened all the world is concerned. Russia is concerned because it affects her route to the sea, and, what is more, her relations to England in Asia. Austria is concerned because it affects her prospects among the Balkan states on the southeast. France is concerned because it affects her commercial ambitions in the Orient, her claims in Africa, her route.to the East, and the interests of her great ally. Germany, although Bismarck has said the Eastern Question is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, is yet actively concerned because of her relations to Russia and France. England is concerned because of Russia and her life-and-death interest, as the maintainer of a world-empire, in the Suez Canal. All her colonial interests in southern Asia and in Africa are involved. International politics all over the world, whatever the apparent issue and habitat, are resolvable into some form of the Eastern Question, and stand in some sensitive connection with this great political stormcentre of the world, the Ægean and the Bosporus. America is well isolated and self-absorbed, but the great question it is now considering, that of the International Arbitration Treaty, is most delicately articulated with the Eastern Question in its larger bearings.

How should a little state like Greece, practically bankrupt, with a population of but two millions and a territory only half the size of the State of New York, avail to affect interests of so wide a reach by interfering in the affairs of an island only a half larger than Long Island? The answer is a matter of geography, and of history as interpreted by geography.

One who has stood by the Straits of Salamis, wandered over the fields of Marathon and Platsæ, coasted among the islands that dot the Ægean, entered in at the Dardanelles, disembarked on the plain of Troy; who has seen the restless conflicts of the heterogeneous peoples and creeds which crowd together about the Bosporus, has heard the murmurings of discontent in Macedonia and Epirus, has seen the outbreak of revolt in Crete, has noted the greedy, nervous intensity of Eastern diplomacy, cannot well escape an impression of the grim pertinacity with which the Eastern Question haunts the history of civilized mankind.

The Eastern Question is not a question of to-day nor of yesterday. When European history first began to be written, it was already there. It had its being before there was any Russia, or any Turkey, or any England. Indeed, it ere, ated the ancient nationality of Greece so far as such nationality ever existed. Greece sprang into being as a nationality out of its discordant elements in order to face the Eastern Question. It is not a problem merely of the possession of Constantinople. This is only a phase of a greater problem, which one must understand in order to have proper perspective in the lesser. It is a question which in its reality concerns the perennial antithesis between Occidentalism and Orientalism, and which in its practical statement for us and ours means this : Who is to lead, who is to champion, who is to represent Occidentalism in its inevitable conflicts with Orientalism ? That is what I call the Greater Eastern Question.

When one crosses the Ægean, which at one place is only a hundred miles wide, or crosses the Bosporus, which is merely a broad river, deep and strong, flowing down from the Black Sea, and comes to the shores of Asia Minor, he is made aware that he has passed out of one world into another world. He has passed out of the Occident into the Orient; and where the boundary is today, there it was of yore, fixed as by the decree of Fate. Who has crossed that boundary has left the active and ambitioned Occident, and has entered into the vast, dreamy, passive, timeless, fatalistic Orient.

The contrast between those two things, Occidentalism and Orientalism, you cannot mistake. You feel it in the air, and yet it may not be easy to define ; it may not apply in every case nor fit every man, but in the main it is this : you have passed out of the time-land into the timeless. The Occident lives in time ; life is its clock ; heart-beats are its ticks. Action followed by achievement is indissolubly joined with the progress of time. Change, development, progress, are the certain products of the union. Action looks to the recombination of old materials for the creation of new. The East, on the other hand, is timeless. There one day is as a thousand years. The great East has time and to spare. In the West, men have so much to do, and so little time in which to do it, that they crowd time by deviceful effort to the full. Action is for the purpose of creation, — of re-shaping, re-forming, creating new things; for personality in the Western sense is endowed with the right of origination. In the East, action looks to continuance, not to creation ; for personality is not there conceived of as endowed with the right of origination and creation. Personality in the governance of the universe has had allotted to it no autonomy even in things belonging unto itself. That empire of the universe the East conceives of as a great despotism of Fate. In it personality has no suffrage, no appeal ; there is only the opportunity of abject resignation to the inevitable. In the West, life is a boat, with a rudder and a keel, that can cross the stream. In the East, life, personality, is a chip swept on in the great current. The West is given preëminently to activity in creating and shaping. It deals, therefore, largely with the shaping of the material universe which is the environment of the individual, and in subduing it to his control. The East is given to introspection. The West tends more to materialism, the East to communion with the things of the spirit. The West is full of creation, progress, restlessness, achievement, failure, disappointment, exultation ; the East abounds in quietism, resignation, and blissful stagnation.

Such are the main outlines of the difference, but they are outlines which force an absolute frontier through the life, through the nations of men. Right there at the Ægean and the Bosporus that frontier has stood all the ages, and along its line the conflicts between Occidentalism and Orientalism have again and again been fought out. Over that frontier influences have gone from one to the other. Greece stood there at the gateway, and whatever came from Asia to Europe came through it. Its islands are a bridge. The sea itself is, as it were, a bridge, and over it Asia has come into Europe. Greece is the waist of the hourglass, through which everything that has passed from the one greater to the other greater has been forced to go ; and it is an old rule of history that the people which has held that gate has determined the development of European civilization.

The old-fashioned way of accounting for the beginning of European civilization dealt largely in migrations, and particularly in migrations of races from Asia into Europe. Civilization was conceived of as transported, so to speak, in knapsacks on the backs of men. We are inclined now to think that the migration theory has been applied much too freely. Wholesale movements of peoples or tribes, entirely dislodging other tribes, occurred even in prehistoric times far less frequently than was formerly supposed. Much that has been called migration was movement, not of peoples, but of power.

We have come to recognize, furthermore, that at the time which yields us the first clues to knowledge the general direction of the movement of peoples on the frontier between Asia and Europe, whether it were the push of peoples or the push of conquest, was, not from Asia toward Europe, but from Europe toward Asia. The prehistoric and the earliest historic push was from the north toward the south, or rather from the northwest toward the southeast. We know, however, that the movement of civilization was in the reverse direction. Coming out of Asia into Europe, it followed the reversed track of the movement of peoples or of power. It is not, therefore, the figure of the knapsack which expresses it, but the figure of the lamp-wick. The oil ascends the wick which is thrust down into it.

When the Aryan races first came in contact with the Asiatic peoples they were undoubtedly vastly inferior in cultivation and in the arts of settled life, but very soon, on more intimate contact, they absorbed the Asiatic civilization, and passed it on to those behind them as by capillary attraction. The Greeks were the first to reach the boundaries of the Orient by the Ægean. Through them, when Rome pushed her empire eastward, civilization moved up the wick into Italy ; the Gaul, passing over the Alps into the Po valley, drew hack the dangerous oil into France; finally, the Teuton, pushing down into Italy, made it a way into the north countries, and that meant ultimately the civilization of Germany. This is the lesson of early European civilization. Will, force, empire, came down from the north ; refinement, sense of form in life, in manners, in thought, and in the arts of settled life, moved back in the reverse of their track.

Rater history, too, illustrates abundantly the same general principle. The incursions of the Goths were only repetitions of those early movements which we call the Aryan migrations, and which had placed the dark-haired Mediterranean populations under the domination of a fair-haired aristocracy. Mediterranean civilization over and over again has refreshed its will-power by draughts from the north.

Let us return now to our two types of human life, Occidentalism and Orientalism. Tlie shores of the Aegean have been their natural meeting-point. Here they have come together, and the pressure exerted from either side has brought them in closest contact. The pressure has varied at different times, and as a result of the varying of pressure the Occidental tide lias flowed, or stayed, or ebbed. Thus the first pressure from the West begins in recorded history when the Greek colonies pushed over toward Asia from the Greek coast. The first stories about the settling of the Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor belong to that time when the Occidental tide was in the flow. Just as sure as the foreign substance intruded itself into the Orient the oil came back upon the wick with refinement and civilization, and we find the eastern shores of Greece half orientalized. We know that for a long time people in Ionia and even in Athens dressed in Oriental styles, plaited their liair in queues, and wore tunics of linen. Altogether, the dress, the habits of life, were Oriental until the reaction came, and we can trace the recuperation of Occidental spirit by the adoption, after the Persian wars, of a native costume, going back to the rough woolens of the Dorians.

This first wave, then, that surged over in the form of Greek colonization was in its turn pushed back when Orientalism found leadership in the Persians. The Persians were Indo-Europeans, who had come over the mountains into the Mesopotamian valley and assumed the leadership of an alien civilization. Under Darius and Xerxes the flood of Orientalism swept out toward the west, crossed the sea, but met a barrier in the solid dykes of Marathon and Salamis and Platæa. Then for a while there is a standstill in the waters while the Greeks contend among themselves for supremacy.

The efforts of Pericles toward consolidating Greece and creating a leadership were all made in view of the Eastern Question. The Parthenon and the glories of the Acropolis are due to the agitation of the Eastern Question. The Delian confederacy was a partial unification of Greece, an attempted confederation for the purpose of offsetting the strength of united Greece against that of the Orient. Greece failed, however, for the time, to unite. Then comes, in the next century, the struggle with Macedon. The public orations of Demosthenes belong to the discussion of the Eastern Question. The subject in hand in most of these orations is, Shall we entrust Greece to the leadership of Macedon ? There was a party, a most respectable party, in Athens, that believed this to be good policy. Demosthenes believed it was not. He was a states’ rights man ; he held to the oldfashioned ideas of city liberties, and was unwilling to commit the whole government of Greece into the hands of a military leader, Philip of Macedon. Be it as it may, Demosthenes failed in his politics ; Philip became leader. His son, Alexander, in a series of brilliant achievements, led Occidentalism out in one great sweep over the plains of Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and to the gates of India. Those were the richest victories that Occidentalism ever won. As Homer had sung of the first Occidental onpush, and Herodotus had told the story of the Oriental back-flow, so now Xenophon and Arrian became the historians of the second Occidental wave. Just so certain as Occidentalism went put with power, civilization returned on the reversed track with equal power. The great mass of Oriental ideas which enriched Europe belong to that time. Christianity is illustration enough. Then Greece flagged. Alexander died; his successors were not leaders ; Greece was unable to hold the tiller, and Rome took it. Home entered into the administration of the Greek Empire. Civilization, in its back-flow, pushed into Italy. Italy became thus the medium through which the wisdom and manners of the Orient, as well as of Greece, were handed over to northern Europe. The Roman Empire signifies in history a successful administration of the Greek Empire, a successful leadership of Occidentalism, — an Occidentalism which had taken essentially the Greek form.

Because Rome undertook the leadership of what had then become the Mediterranean civilization, receiving it from Greece, we have learned the things which have come from that meeting - point of the peoples by way of Italy. Thus it is that we have a Latinized philosophy, a Latinized medicine, a Latinized art, a Latinized philology, and a Latinized Christianity. What made the Renaissance except the determination no longer to follow the devious route by way of Italy in getting back to sources, but to strike across by a direct route leading straight to Aristotle, straight to Hippocrates, straight to the Parthenon, straight to the pages of the Greek New Testament ? If Alexander had not died a young man, if he had lived to solidify his empire, if he had found some one to follow him who would have been a leader like himself, then we should not have had a Latinized philosophy and a Latinized Christianity ; we should have had a democratic, and not an oligarchic Christian Church ; we should have had a spiritual, and not a physical doctrine of the Incarnation ; we should have learned philosophy, not out of translations and misunderstandings, but from the fountainhead of the great schools of Greece. We should have been spared Latin grammar, and we should have gained in the schools our acquaintance with Greek oratory direct from Demosthenes, and not at second hand through Cicero; we should have learned what epic poetry is from the great soul of it. Homer, and not from its reflection, Virgil. We should have had in the arts and sciences a nineteenth century instead of a ninth, for Aristotle brought men almost to the gate. But these things were not to be. If we look at history as Providence, it required Rome to insert into Greek history the element of respect for order, and of individual subordination to the general purposes of the community. From this may we not learn how important it has been, for the civilized world of the West, who sat at the gate by the Ægean ? For the one who controlled that gateway put his stamp on what came through it.

The reaction from Alexander’s inroads upon the East came late, but it came strong. It came in the form of Islam. Mohammedanism is inspired Orientalism ; it is Orientalism set on fire. On Islam hurled itself in tremendous power ; one might think it held within it something of the force gathered from the vehement impact of Alexander’s onslaught, a thousand years before, — a force pent up for centuries under the firm weight of the Roman Empire. It came on in a terrible tidal wave, swept across northern Africa, across Spain, half across France, over Asia Minor, up into Europe to the gates of Vienna, and buried old Greece under a bitter slavery of centuries.

The tide of Islam spent itself. Slowly the waters receded. Spain long since became dry land. This century has done noble work in ditching and draining. The Balkan states have been freed; Greece has been free since the twenties. But the Sick Man lingers still on European soil. He stays where he is by sufferance of the Powers. He stays by virtue of the seeming fact that in the multitude of powers there is weakness. The Persian Empire survived the defeats of Salamis and Platæa for five generations, so long as the Greeks could not agree among themselves as to who should be their leader ; so Turkey tarries in Europe because the forces of modern Occidentalism are not united under leadership. They are suspicious of one another. They unite for the purpose of preventing things from being done. Each thinks he can hold his neighbor in check most effectively by coöperating with him. The concert of the Great Powers is devoted to the rendering of harmonious silence. The Turkey in Europe of to-day is a monument to the saving grace of the balance of power doctrine. So long as the forces of Occidentalism are disunited, or merely united in a sham accord, the Turkish barrier will deny the Westen world entrance to Asia; but when the leader emerges, Occidentalism will straightway push out over Alexander’s track to the Persian Gulf, and this time it will build its roads with iron. Who is to be that leader ? Who is to be Occidentalism’s champion in the twentieth century ?

It, is to hear the answer to this question that the world is waiting now. What it will be no man can foretell. We must wait for the coining century to tell it to us. And yet it would seem to be within our power to narrow the question down within the range of a few possible answers. The factors of the situation, the data of the problem, lie open to our view. Let us review them.

As a state, Turkey is a heterogeneous assemblage of peoples under the absolute sway of the Sultan. It is a government lacking altogether a sense for the right of a community to choose concerning its own government. It thoroughly represents the Oriental idea, whereby government is transcendent, a power above and outside the people, and not immanent, a power within the people. And herein lies the application of the Occidental-Oriental antithesis to political institutions. The Occidental conception of life as active and creative, inhering in active and self-moving autonomous personalities, begets the political idea of what we call self - government. The idea which represents personality as self-directed in the fulfillment of its own purposes becomes, when applied to politics, the idea that communities shall be self-governed in things belonging to themselves. This is the political upshot of Occidentalism. The opposite thereto is the upshot of Orientalism. A potentate seated on a very high throne under a very broad canopy, and loaded with very costly jewels, with prostrate subjects bowing in obeisance before him, — that is the tableau of Oriental government.

Turkey is thoroughly Oriental, representatively Oriental, in its political spirit. Its location upon Occidental soil is a geographical misfit, an historical anachronism. It is a stranded wreck, left high and dry beyond the sea-wall by a receding tidal wave; but no one undertakes to clear it away, because the land on which it rests is in litigation.

Among the various peoples and races whom the fate of history has assigned to Turkish sway are the Armenians. Though their proper district is a province in northeastern Asia Minor, they are found scattered all through the Orient, nearly a quarter million of them living in Constantinople alone, and constituting almost a quarter of its population. They are in race the ThracoPhrygians of old, Indo-Europeans like ourselves, descendants of a people some of whom almost beyond a doubt defended ancient Troy against the Greeks, — the kin, therefore, of Hector and Priam. It is a quaint disposition of historic fate that the modern representatives of Orientalism are finding their chief difficulties to-day in dealing with the modern representatives of Hector and Priam on the one hand, and of Achilles and Agamemnon on the other. So constant are the factors of history.

The Armenians preserve their distinct language, an earlier form of which is embalmed in a rich and various literature, reaching from the first translations of Greek works of science, literature, philosophy, and religion in the fifth century of our era down through a long series of more independent productions to the twelfth century. A modern literature couched in a modern idiom abounds since the eighteenth century. The people are adherents of Christianity, and have had a church form of their own distinct from the Greek since the sixth century. They have a language of their own, a literature of their own, a religion of their own, a well-characterized national and racial type ; and we Occidentals believe that a people possessing so many of the elements of individuality and personality have a right to a government of their own. The Turkish Empire, however, in its lack of sense for what we may call distributed government, has no place for their individuality in its scheme. As far as they possess individuality and the tendency to use it, they are to the Turks simply a plague-spot on the empire.

It must be admitted that the Armenians are not an easy people to get on with. They are distinguished by an energy, a busy-ness, and a fondness for acquisition that are almost super-Occidental. They are selfish, personally unattractive, and strikingly lacking in traits of nobility and self-respect. The average Armenian is unquestionably of sharp intelligence so far as small things go. The saying is that it takes ten Jews to outwit one Greek, and ten Greeks to outwit one Armenian. He is, unquestionably, extremely irritating to the quietistic, resigned, fatalistic Turk, The two have little in common. The Armenian is clearly a pestilent fellow, and the Turk has decided to get rid of him. The Armenian is a persistent source of unrest. He is a “ kicker.” What men do with “kickers,” in the Occidental scheme of things, is to vote them down. The Turk knows no other way than to club them down, cut their heads off, or sink them in the Sea of Marmora. He is applying this threefold recipe with patient zeal as occasion offers.

Crete is another plague-spot on the Turkish map. The population of the island is essentially Greek. Of its quarter million inhabitants, there are perhaps fifty thousand Mussulmans, but all speak Greek. Since the seventeenth century it has been in the hands of Turkey. The insurrection of 1866-68 stirred profoundly the sympathy of Christian peoples, but the governments of Europe as represented by the Powers insisted, even with a severe menace to Greece, in maintaining the status quo of Turkish possession. Repeated insurrections have taken place, notably those of 1891 and 1896; indeed, the island has been in a perpetual state of unrest during most of this century. Various promises of reformed administration have been made by Turkey at different times, but no satisfactory government has resulted. Turkey treats the island as spoil, and seeks only to exploit it, not to guarantee it order and the opportunity of self-government. Turkey is unable to administer the government. Local self-government is an impossible and unthinkable thing within her borders except as she is hired by the form of a tribute to stay away. Crete deserves at least autonomy. Autonomy under the nominal suzerainty of Turkey would have been a possible temporary solution, awhile ago. Such autonomy has been accorded the island of Samos and the Libanon provinces, and is said to work satisfactorily. Delay has made it now more difficult. The Cretan people undoubtedly desire annexation to Greece. A few weeks ago the Greek flag was carried on to its shores, and Greek soldiery assumed the protection of the inhabitants. The stories we have received of the enthusiasm with which this oppressed and suffering people greeted the appearance of their deliverers constitute a touching appeal to every heart in Christendom in which abides a love of liberty. — a love of liberty which teaches that a people have the right to a government whose sources and ultimate sanctions are from within itself. Turkish authority in any form has almost ceased to be a fact in the island. Such order as there is now is maintained by the Greek regular troops, by the insurgents, and in a few towns by the Powers.

To the mind of the Turk, the Greek is what the Armenian is, a nuisance. The Turkish theory of government offers no full solution for the problems raised by his presence except utter subjugation or extermination. Conditions similar to those in Crete exist in the coast districts of Macedonia and in Epirus, although in the latter the discontent is not so acute or so well formulated. In both the prevailing population is Greek, and the language, even of the Mussulman in Epirus, is Greek. The unnaturalness of the situation teaches that postponement of a settlement can only be temporary. These districts represent areas still half submerged in the stagnant pools of Islam’s retreating tide. No fresh wave is coming. The sooner they are drained off and returned to tillage the better for the world. Still the selfish cowardliness of the Powers hesitates.

Why are the great nations of Europe united in such apparent earnestness of effort to keep little Greece from her own ? It certainly does not seem likely that the addition of an island containing but a quarter of a million of inhabitants to a state containing only two millions would seriously disturb the balance of power. But that is not the whole of the matter. The Greeks are a people that must, at least to some extent, be reckoned with in the future settlement of Eastern questions. Commercial interests around the entire line of the Ægean are largely in Greek hands. One third the population of Constantinople itself is Greek. Now that the Greek state has been created, it constitutes a rendezvous and point d’appui for the sentiment of nationality among the scattered millions of Greek blood and language. The Greek nation itself is bankrupt. The land offers no abundant promise of greatness under present-day conditions., It is not suited to agriculture. It has neither water-power, minerals in abundance, nor coal supply. But it has an energetic, active, optimistic, though restless and impulsive, and as yet half-educated people. They are abstemious and thrifty. In foreign lands they accumulate wealth. They are profoundly patriotic. All the traditions of their glorious past are moulded into the substance of their modern national life. They are thorough Occidentals, and their antagonism to Orientalism, both in spirit and in the concrete forms of Turkey and the Turks, is deep-seated. The conflict between the two is on, and it will last to the death, because it is grounded in an indestructible difference of thought, mood, and character.

If all the territory in which the Greek blood and the Greek speech predominate were to be formed into a nation, we should have a Pan-Hellenic state ten millions strong, that would surround the entire Ægean. and menace, if not control, the waterways to the Black Sea. By ties of religion this nationality would be affiliated with Russia; by facts of blood, of speech, of political instinct, of national traditions, it would be a new and independent element intruded into the political situation, a strong, effective bar in the waterway between Russia and the Mediterranean as well as between England and the East, and a solid wedge between the Kaaba and the Lateran. The policy of the balance of power does not favor the creation of nationality on the lines of race and speech.

Any disturbance, furthermore, of existing conditions at so sensitive a spot as the Ægean, be the dislodgment ever so slight, is viewed with suspicion and even with dread. There is a long list of claims filed against the estate of Turkey, and the Powers are loath to recognize any preferred creditors. They all wish to be present when the division is made. If Crete is to be assigned to Greece, other claimants must be appeased with some consideration. To release it now were to relinquish elements of a future barter.

But there are other elements of the question. When Russia comes down to the Mediterranean, as she confidently expects to do before many years,she must secure her path through the Ægean. Her claim on Athos was long since filed ; Imbros too she will need, and why not Crete ? But Crete lies where the waterways of Russia and England meet. The track from Gibraltar to the Suez Canal passes Crete. The world-empire of England demands the maintenance of her route by the canal. Can England be sure that Greece will never become the tool of Russia ? The ties of the common faith are strong.

Among the small states of the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria is now the one developing most rapidly in strength and prestige. She has become the rival of Greece among the lesser states. They both look with greedy eyes toward Macedonia, whose inland population is Slavic, but whose coast population is Greek. They both, though more remotely, are interested in the question of the ultimate disposition of Constantinople. It has been the dream of Greek politicians for generations, the so-called grande idée, that some day Constantinople should be restored to Greek possession. It is an old-time prophecy that when Greece should have a Constantine as king and a Sophia as queen, then she would return to the throne of Byzantium. These conditions are likely to be fulfilled when the present Crown Prince comes into the succession. This fancy plays some part in the imaginations of the people, and in disturbing times like these no small part. One third of the present population of Constantinople is Greek. The language of its commerce is largely Greek. It is an old Greek town. Within the dome of St. Sophia the face of the Christos Pankrator peers dimly forth from the grand Byzantine mosaics through the black paint with which the Moslem has smeared it. It waits for the day when the cross shall replace the crescent on the dome. It would be historic justice if the Greek might place it there.

But Bulgaria is on the highroad, and behind is the solid push of Pan-Slavism. Bulgaria is now reconciled with Servia and Montenegro, and by the formal act of allowing the baptism of the Crown Prince into the Eastern Church she sealed her acceptance of Russia’s headship. Those were significant words spoken by the Prince of Bulgaria on the occasion of the baptism: " I sunder the ties that bind me to the West, and turn my face toward the East and the rising sun.” All the Balkan states, with the exception of Roumania, have therefore now virtually accepted the suzerainty of Russia. Roumania, in her isolation, has reëstablished friendly relations with Greece.

Austria, of all the Great Powers, fears most acutely the reopening of the Eastern Question at this juncture. The SlavicBalkan states, consolidated under Russia’s protection, interpose between her and the Ægean a solid wall. It has been her eager ambition to secure a port on the Ægean (Saloniki), and a right of way to it. She has no chance now. Any dislodgment of conditions in the Orient at this time could bring her no good, and only relative injury. For the time being her mission in the southeast is closed.

Germany utilizes her influence as a power apparently in Russia’s behalf, so far as the Eastern Question is concerned. Direct interest she claims to have none; but she has a great interest in retaining the friendship of Russia. She stands between the upper and nether millstones of France and Russia. If both are hostile, she is lost. It is therefore her policy to trade her Eastern emoluments for Russian favors. The failure of England’s effort, a year ago, to extort reforms from the Sultan, the fiasco of Salisbury and Saloniki, was due more or less directly to Germany’s duplicity. Germany played secretly Russia’s game, with the result that Turkey became practically a province of Russia.

This pro-Russian policy of Germany has taken more visible form in recent years, but it is of long standing. The dying words of the old Emperor showed what was his great solicitude : “ The Czar of Russia must be treated with consideration.” There were men who feared, and with reason, that Frederick, when he came to the throne, would have English rather than Russian sympathies. These same men tried to prevent his reigning, and rejoiced when the ninetynine days came to their tragic end. In the recent dealings between the Powers there have been indications of the development of a line of fracture. It runs between France-Italy-England and Germany - Russia. When the time comes that France shall turn to England for alliance, we may know the fracture is complete ; then the world s great struggle is at hand.

One reason for Germany’s unfriendly attitude toward Greece, at the present juncture, is found in the fact that the Greek debt was negotiated through Berlin bankers, and is still largely held in Germany. War is a menace to values, and the banker is naturally in favor of peace, and peace at all costs to all sentiment. How large a part personal dislikes may play in determining the action of the Kaiser it is not easy to estimate. He is an able, energetic, but withal somewhat unaccountable man.

This brings us to Russia. What power is there in the neighborhood of Constantinople competent to enter in and possess it ? Russia seems to-day the destined possessor. She was once at its gates, and only England’s interposition kept her out. England’s prestige in the Orient has just now suffered severe loss by the collapse of her Armenian policy. Russia has made steady gains. The Slavic-Balkan states are her children : first by moral claims, for she freed them; now by formal diplomatic recognition. They are closing in steadily about Constantinople. Russia has, besides, a natural geographic claim. So great a power as that cannot be cooped up away from the seaboard. The Bosporus is her natural exit. She is a great world-power bestriding Europe and Asia. France and China, as well as Turkey, are her allies, almost her provinces. She is immensely strong in her situation with her back against the ice of the north, and no enemy to menace her there but the polar bears. She is strong for diplomatic aggression, because her whole power can be swung by a single hand. Safe in her position, unmenaced from the rear, she has only to bide her time, and as occasion offers to push forward. The awful consistency of her foreign policy, ruthless of right, reckless of truth, framed on a plan that spans generations, conceived in terms of world-empire, may well appall us. That policy long ago assigned the United States to the list of traditional friends. The purpose was to alienate us from her future rival, England. A recent occurrence exemplifies most grimly how firm the consistency is. When, after President Cleveland’s Venezuelan message, our treasury was threatened with embarrassment by the outflow of gold, Russia offered privately through her legation to furnish us fifty millions of gold. We were to understand that we were not to be losers in opposing England.

She is strong, furthermore, in a certain sympathy her semi-barbarism has with that of the border peoples of Asia. The peoples of the East have always preferred the Russian to the Englishman. The Englishman they find to be blunt. They think him harsh and selfish. They think him blunt chiefly because he tells the truth. Russian diplomacy understands the Oriental use of language. Language is used by the Oriental for the purpose of producing kindly feeling or of inducing another mortal to see things as he does, but certainly not for the purpose of reporting upon objective verities. It is the mechanism for reporting upon the greater subjective verities. The Englishman is not liked, though England is everywhere respected, feared, and trusted.

Many believe that Constantinople has been systematically fortified against the English to the west, but not, at least by land, against Russia to the east. A Russian army can enter Constantinople without great difficulty. When the question of forcing the Dardanelles with an English fleet was agitated, last winter, the English naval authorities estimated that, of the nineteen ships lying at Saloniki, six must be sacrificed to do it. The cards have been stacked for Russia. It looks to-day as if the ultimate occupation of Constantinople by Russia were a foregone conclusion.

What has England to say? The matter concerns her. It seemed for a time that the discovery of the route by the Cape of Good Hope would provide an evasion of the Eastern Question, and free her from the necessity of worrying about the Ægean. But the opening of the Suez Canal has changed things, and, as if by jealous interposition of geographic fate, drawn the issue back to the old fighting-ground in the eastern Mediterranean. If she is to hold India and Australia, England must control the Suez Canal and its approaches.

In severe contrast with Russia, England stands in political isolation, — a grand isolation; strong, not by alliances, but in and by her own intelligence, rectitude, and Anglo-Saxon grit. England has made up her mind that she must be strong enough, if necessary, to face all Europe single-handed. Within the last five years her navy has been doubled in strength. Within the next two years her army will be. She is preparing for an inevitable conflict. That conflict concerns this question : Who is to be the leader and champion of Occidentalism in the twentieth century, — shall it be the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav ?

Has Russia the natural right to be the leader of Occidentalism ? Occidentalism grounds itself in the right of the individual personality and the individual community to find the law of its action in its own purposes of being. Russia represents government from above and from outside. It means consolidation, not distribution of government. It pushes its interests by appeal to the unreal and by use of deceit. The English Empire, ill defined as it may be in its apparent organization, is so by virtue of reliance on the immanent governing power of self-directing bodies of men of whom it may be said, " The law is within them.”

The world is arraying itself in two great camps. Russia spans the north from China to France, and, guiding the foreign policy of Germany, rules, in the last decisions, northern Asia and all Europe except England and Italy. England spans the seas, and holds in a mysterious bond of common interest and guaranteed justice the diverse elements of her world-empire. It is possible that Russia’s strength has been greatly overestimated. The bonds which hold her empire together might weaken under the testing of adversity. Those which bind the British Empire together would strengthen. The financial difficulties which Russia would have to face, in the event of a great struggle, are an element of weakness in her situation. England’s resources are unlimited, infinitely varied, and self-supplied. The power of the British Empire as it is now organized has never been called to the test. I believe it to be enormously underrated.

The battle is being arrayed. The prize of victory is the same for which the battle was set of old on the field of Chæronea,— the leadership of Occidentalism. It may not, we trust it will not, be a battle of arms. It may well become a battle of latent forces. Whatever be its form, it will be a battle between the Slav and the Anglo-Saxon; and when it comes, the Anglo-Saxon world must not be divided against itself. The question now pending in the Senate at Washington is a constituent part of the great Eastern Question. When England, in the cause of Occidental righteousness, essayed to establish an Occidental principle for the Armenian issue, she found Anglo-Saxondom divided against itself. If out of the Venezuelan controversy shall finally issue an agreement for permanent international arbitration, then Anglo-Saxon spirit may well enough set out to face the world. In the Arbitration Treaty the Anglo-Saxons will say to themselves: We will not spend our strength in fighting each other. In the Venezuelan settlement England says to the United States : We leave you to fulfill your mission as representing the Anglo-Saxon spirit in the New World. We shall not be hampered in fulfilling ours in the Old. That mission means, what in general has come to expression wherever in the past English sway has gone, selfish and coarse as at times it may have been : Equal justice shall be guaranteed to weak and strong. The weak shall not have fewer rights because they are weak, or the strong more rights because they are strong, but men shall have equal rights before the law because they are men. The law shall have its ultimate power in the respect of the governed. Government shall find its sanctions in expressing the purposes and interests of the community governed. Equal justice, personal rights, distributed government, immanency of law,— this is the Occidental idea which the Anglo-Saxon spirit offers to champion before the world.

It is no longer a question merely who shall hold Constantinople, or who shall control the Suez Canal, or who shall command the pass of Thermopylæ, or who shall dictate the oracles of Delphi. It is in essence the old question, but it is stated now in terms of greater things. The battle opens on the same old field, but the habitable globe is involved. The issue is stated in terms of Greece, but it is written in terms of the succession to her ancient leadership in human civilization. In the spoils of the battle little Greece will have small part; but then, it is only one more illustration of the fate of history that has left her desolate, while her ideas have gone forth into the great world, following the course of the wick, and shedding their light through the lamps of others whose strength avails to set them higher and give their beams a wider and a surer reach.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler.