The Return of the Turk

I

THE Turk has returned to Europe. His return will mean the despair of all those who are working for permanent peace. His return was unnecessary. He could have been kept out of Europe by treaty. But Mr. Lloyd George and his Government refused, first, to assist the Republic of Armenia with the stores and guns which they swept over from the Black Sea ports to carry out a war against the Bolsheviki in Russia. This enabled the Turks to concentrate against the European forces. Secondly, they encouraged a Greek expedition to advance two hundred miles into purely Turkish territory, supplying them with rhetoric instead of with guns, and failing to accept the warnings of everyone who was familiar with the Eastern question, that, as soon as the Nationalist Turks under Kemal obtained arms, the far-flung battle-line of the Greek army would be swept into hopeless defeat.

I remember, when the issue of peace or war seemed to be in the balance, in 1914, and the Cabinet were discussing whether they would join with Russia in offering a joint guaranty for the then boundaries of Turkey for fifteen or twenty years, being rebuked by Lord Grey for what he assumed, I suppose, to be the blind fury of a member of the Balkan Committee who had seen what the Turks do when they go into war or suppress an insurrection. I said that, if Turkey wished to go into war against the Allies, it was better that she should do so, in the interest of the permanent peace of the world; for almost every European war—1827, 1854, 1877. 1885, 1912, 1913, and the Great War of 1914— had grown out of the inability of the Turks to rule, the ability of the Turks to massacre, and the impossible attempts made by governments with rival ambitions to obtain portions of that Turkey whose capacity for governing or even for work had vanished in a hundred years.

I asked that a dean job might be made of it all. Lord Grey, not unnaturally, asserted that we had enough nations to fight at present without adding to their number; and if I could have forecasted the tragic slaughter of Mr. Winston Churchill’s expedition at Gallipoli, I might have been in accordance with him. In any case, the Turks came into the war under their secret treaty with Germany, which was made before the war began. When the war was ended, we succeeded in slashing them to pieces, and we could have prevented any capacity for their recovery. Their representatives agreed to the Treaty of Sèvres. We have not carried out its provisions, and it has been kicked into the gutter.

And now the Turk stands triumphant, with England and Europe almost begging for satisfactory terms, and with the whole Moslem world rejoicing at the defeat of the Greeks, which they regard as the defeat of England; and, in order to prevent a greater catastrophe than that which we ourselves have created, we have promised them the rulership of Constantinople and the return of Eastern Thrace, thus thrusting this barbaric race once more into the heart of the Balkans. It is a dreadful ending to one of the most deplorable pieces of British ‘diplomacy’ ever known.

A distinguished soldier, who has just come back from the Near East in the midst of these desperate times, told me that there was no alternative to this promise; but ‘of course,’ he added, ’it is certain to lead to another war within ten years.’ Such is the result of the stupidity of Britain and the cleverness of France, and, if I may say so with respect, of the deliberate refusal of America to have anything to do with the subject at all.

II

The Turk never has had and never will have a ‘homeland’ in Europe. He entered it a barbaric tribe, like a scourge or a plague. He stormed up to the gates of Vienna. At one moment it seemed as if all Christendom might be destroyed by this band of savages. It. was saved by a great battle under the walls of the capital, led by the King of Poland, and the people sank down to a comparative peace, w ith whole nationalities being submerged for hundreds of years and even their names forgotten. The comparative peace meant, of course, a long system of oppression, combined with total inability to rule, or to make anything, or to encourage any trade or commerce. Slowly the Turkish Empire rotted with internal decay. Gradually these nations, which had been inarticulate perhaps for hundreds of years, came to realize their nationality; and as the Turk was dying, they were achieving a new birth. For there seems to be in this strange tribe an unalterable and inexplicable element of blight after victory, in the very centre and core of the people. The Arabs once established a magnificent civilization; the Moslems of India possess culture, knowledge of the world, and capacity for work. Even in Persia there is a constructive element in the arts; and in Morocco a chivalry which has earned the respect of foreign observers.

But this tribe did nothing. They lived on fighting and, in their own homeland of Anatolia, to a small extent on peasant cultivation. They raised the money that they required from the Christian populations over whom they held overlordship; and these Christian populations paid, through taxes, the cash required to keep the Turkish governors in idleness; while for all financial complications they invariably turned to the Jews, who were very friendly to the Turks, and who to-day, even in England, are appealing for ‘fair play’ for the Turk. He has had ‘fair play’ for nearly three hundred years. He has produced nothing in literature, music, art, science, or any of the prominent elements of civilization. His conduct of affairs has been a peace with oppression, varied by risings against, that oppression, or a fight with some of his subordinate nations, backed by one or more Christian powers. He is alien to everything that Europe regards as legitimate methods of treating people who are subject to another’s sway. And he has now grown so tired of the continual interference of Europe with his periodical massacres and atrocities, that he has made up his mind to avoid the necessity for such interference in the future, by the simple method of extermination of all the Christian people under his control. By so doing he has committed suicide; for he is killing in every town and village, or putting to flight by the fear of his advent, all the artificers and makers of anything in the way of manufacture, and is leaving nothing but a bankrupt nation of men who appear to have no capacity but in the carrying-on of war and, to a limited extent, in the work of agriculture. But he will keep the Jews with him; and I suppose he hopes that, by giving concessions of great wealth in Asia Minor to various competing European financiers, he will obtain the money that is necessary for his own desire to live on easy lines, doing no work at all.

III

Three times the expulsion of the Turks from Europe seemed inevitable, and three times they have retained their position through the folly of Christendom. In 1878, the Russian armies were encamped at San Stefano, under the walls of the most famous city of the world. The grand duke who was in command of the armies sent back to the Tsar a message that, with the loss of not more than 20,000 men, he could storm these ancient historic walls and be in Constantinople within twentyfour hours; and he asked for an answer, yes or no, to the question whether he should conduct such an enterprise. No answer, either yes or no, was returned. It was quite obvious that the Tsar wished this action to be taken, but knew that he would have to disavow it to the Great Powers. But, as Sir Edwin Pears told me, the commander was not a man but a grand duke, and the Russian army never moved.

In the meantime, the English Ambassador found the Sultan packing up His wives and luxuries, with the determination immediately to ferry off over the Bosporus and retire into Asia. The Ambassador said to him: ‘This may be the safest way of protecting your possessions, but be sure of one thing: if you once cross into Asia you will never come back to Europe again.’

That reply prevented his departure. If Russia had once got into Constantinople, she would never have been turned out. Disraeli went to Berlin, where, in conjunction with Bismarck, he tore the San Stefano Treaty to pieces and substituted the Treaty of Berlin, which was the legitimate father of the great. European War.

On Saturday, June 22, 1878, the aged Jew statesman telegraphed to the aged woman Empress, whom he delighted to call ‘the Fairy’:' Russia surrenders and accepts the English scheme for the European frontiers of the Empire, and its military and political rule by the Sultan. Bismarck says there is again a Turkey in Europe.’

‘It is all due to your energy and firmness,’ was the exultant Fairy Queen’s reply.

Later, when Beaconsfield had further conversations with Bismarck, ‘You have made a present to the Sultan,’ he asserted, ‘of the richest province of the world; four thousand square miles of the richest soil.’

‘When he heard that we had annexed Cyprus,’ notes Disraeli with his usual cynicism, ‘he said: “You have done a wise thing. This is progress. It will be popular; a nation likes progress.” His idea of progress,’ so Disraeli comments, ‘was evidently seizing something. He said he looked upon our relinquishment of the Ionian Islands as the first sign of decadence; Cyprus puts us all right again.’¹

The second occasion was after wars and rumors of war, and the yearly affirmation of unrest in the Balkans ‘in the spring.’ In 1912, the Balkan States, defying the veto of the Concert of Europe, — les gr ancles impuissances, — fell like a hammer upon the Turk, and, in violation of every judgment of every so-called military expert, shattered his armies into fragments. Once more the Bulgarian army stood outside the walls of Chatalja, with the great prize of Constantinople just before them. But they had been exhausted by the tremendous conflicts at Kirk Kilise and Lüle-Burgas, with weeks of continual fighting. They attacked in a fog, where no positions could be ascertained, and found themselves killing their own men, firing on each other; and in the evening, after enormous losses, the lines remained unpierced. Had the result been otherwise, they would have been in Constantinople in twenty-four hours, and nothing could have replaced the Turks there. A few months after, amid the intrigues of the Great Powers behind, egging on one against the other, they found themselves hopelessly defeated by the combination of all their allies, and Turkey again in Constantinople and in occupation of Thrace and Adrianople and once again the power for evil in the politics of Europe.

The last, and greatest, opportunity was after the World War. At the conclusion of the Armistice, Turkey lay hopelessly defeated, with no resources for resistance. The Treaty of Sèvres, which was accepted by Turkey’s representatives, drove them from Thrace, gave them a mere titulary rule in Constantinople, established a neutral and Greek zone round the Christian populations of Smyrna, and created an Armenian Republic, which might have saved some portion of that unhappy nation whose men, women, and children had been massacred deliberately by hundreds of thousands during the war. Eastern Thrace was given over to the government of Greece, and, although I have no love for the Grecian Government, I think, on examination, that it governed there without tyranny and without undue oppression of the Turkish population. Constantinople was occupied by military units of all the powers. The Greeks were encouraged to enter Smyrna, where they massacred some of their own enemies. But, instead of remaining there, they were encouraged to make an expedition two hundred miles into the interior, into specific Turkish territory, to a position which no military expert of any kind would recognize as a possible line of defense, if the Turks once again acquired the power to strike.

What has been our policy since? We had piles of stores and guns at the southern Black Sea ports, which, if given to the new Armenian Republic, would have enabled it to preserve its existence. A friend of mine, who was present at that time in those regions, has described the despair and terror of the Armenian representatives as they saw these guns and stores being swept across the Black Sea to the Crimea, to be used as gifts from England to the adventurers who were creating civil war in Russia, and who, one after another, went down before the Bolshevist attack.

It is said, although I have no actual evidence of it, that guns and stores thus captured were sent round by the Bolsheviki to Kemal and his army at Angora, and that the Greek army was broken by British guns. However that may be, after the mandate for Armenia had been offered to America and refused, and offered to the League of Nations and refused, on the ground that, it could not provide a dollar or bestow a rifle, that republic was wiped out; and with it the last hope of the Armenian race.

A Turkish envoy came to Europe, to see if a new peace could not be made, containing indeed many things unpalatable to British ideas, but also things that would have averted t he madness and massacre of war. The British Prime Minister refused to see him, as did also the Foreign Secretary. He went back with the impression that only force would prevail. The Turks threw themselves at the centre of the Greek line, and broke it in a day. The Greek army fled to the seacoast, without any remarkable casualties, and after them fled, as fast as was possible, the Christian population of Western Anatolia, although a considerable number fell into the hands of the Turks, especially the women and children, and received the treatment which the Turk has invariably given to a conquered race after victory.

Smyrna, the ‘infidel city’ of Turkish tradition, was burned to the ground. The whole Christian civilization of Asia Minor was scattered in hopeless confusion among the islands and ports of the new Greek homeland and Western Thrace. The British Government, which had previously forbidden the Greeks to end the war by themselves entering the capital, and threatened to send British soldiers against them, could prevent the actual occupation of Constantinople only by promising that, in the forthcoming conference, they would support a return of Constantinople to the Turks, and the return also of Eastern Thrace. Turkey would again enter Europe as a European power.

The whole prestige of England and the larger prestige of Christendom has been shaken to its foundations, from Adrianople to Agra. The East believes that it has conquered the West; and it will remain in that belief, with the determination to conquer more, until a new war shows it that it has lived in illusion. No more disastrous record of the combination of diplomacy, war, and the fear of war has ever been recorded in history, since the treatment of the then American Colonies by the Government of Lord North, which rent asunder two peoples who, at the first indeed, never desired to separate, and produced a seven years’ war which even now is not forgotten.

IV

It would be impertinent in me to criticize any action the American Government has thought fit to take in connection with these measures. America has shown an enormous compassion, not in words only, but also in deeds, in connection with the horrors which are devastating Europe; and perhaps she is right in refusing to entangle herself in the questions between France and Germany and the interminable wrangles of the Supreme Council. But what I must confess to be surprised at is, as T seem to see it, the comparative indifference of America, and especially of the American churches, to the doings of the Turks in Armenia, and to the present hideous situation. No nation can protect those missionaries who go forth under the recognition that their lives may be jeopardized, and if the Americans had confined themselves to endeavoring to convert Mohammedans to Christianity, America would have a just right to claim that those who did so did it at their own risk only. There has been too much truth in the gibe that, while the missionary has said, ‘Let us pray,’ the Union Jack has been run up on the flagstaff.

But America in Turkey and Asia Minor was in a different position. She was not out to convert Moslems to Christianity. She was out to assist, educate, and civilize the great mass of Christian populations suffering from the Turkish tyranny. It was an educational rather than a theological work. Standing high over the Bosporus is the great Robert College, in which were educated almost all the men who, when the time came, were called to be leaders and rulers in Bulgaria.

I visited at Scutari the training colleges for Armenian women teachers, run by efficient American women, and I found myself, in the intolerable squalor of that suburb of Constantinople, in the presence of clean and decent human life. In every town in Anatolia there was an American teacher training up the Armenian girls into conditions of purity and decency and repudiation of the normal treatment of women by the Turkish harem system. During the war the Turks wiped out the whole of this American civilization in pursuit of a policy of murder and torture, when it would have been better, for the most part, that their victims had been killed outright.

Under my supervision we compiled a record of these hideous stories, with Professor Toynbee, the historian, sorting and collating the evidence for over six months. We threw out for the most part evidence which could not be corroborated, and we threw out most native evidence. The book is a record of testimony from European and American men and women, who actually saw the things happen, and who were impotent to prevent these hideous happenings. They caused the considered judgment of Lord Bryce to condemn them as an effort to exterminate the whole nation, without discrimination of age or sex, whose misfortune it was to be subjects of a nation devoid of sympathy or pity; and the policy they disclosed as one without precedent even in the bloodstained annals of the East. There is even, in this volume, evidence of German missionary residents with records of events surpassing human imagination. The evidence was submitted also to Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, late Minister of Education in Mr. Lloyd George’s Government, Professor Gilbert Murray, and Mr. Moorfield Storey, ex-President of the American Bar Association.

The report was published as a British Government document, entitled ‘The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire,’and I scattered thousands of copies among the leaders of public opinion in America. It reveals an attempt at the extermination of a race. The men suffered least. They were taken out at the port of Trebizond and sunk in the Black Sea; or were carried up into the valleys, separated from the women and children, and there slaughtered by bayonet or rifle. The most terrible fate was that of the girls brought up in the American colleges and schools, as delicate and refined, and often as distinguished in intelligence, as the girls of London or Boston or New York. Many ol these were outraged and then had their throats cut; many were outraged by many Turkish soldiers each, and committed suicide or went insane; others were taken after this experience into Turkish harems, where they still remain. The old men and women and the children were driven in great battues through the desert, without food or water, flogged when they rested or lay down exhausted, until hunger or disease, or some kindly bullet of their escort, put an end to their misery. That was done during the war by direct command from Constantinople itself, especially by Talaat and Enver Bey. Talaat was subsequently assassinated in Berlin, by an Armenian whose family had suffered under this policy of devilry; and it is to the honor of the German court that the assassin was acquitted. Enver Bey is supposed to be dead, but is probably alive somewhere in Eastern Caucasia.

But in the whole process, not only Armenian, but all the American, civilization was completely annihilated. And the record and memory of such a gigantic outrage upon common humanity, in which no religious question between Moslems and Christians entered into the matter at all, resulted, first, in the panic-stricken flight of all men, women, and children who could escape in Western Anatolia, when the Turks broke through at Karahissar ; and secondly, when England had declared that she would support the giving-back of Thrace to Turkey, in a similar panicstricken flight from Thrace, to escape anywhere from the treatment that all men and women fear. And I must confess to a certain wonder that, so far as I have been able to read, the churches in America have not risen up and, with their enormous forces of organization and influence, declared that, however squalid may be the squabble between France, England, and Germany for booty, at least the maintenance of these gigantic slaughterhouses must cease.

In 1877, over a tiny massacre at Batak in Bulgaria, which would be hardly noticed in comparison with the present outrage, Mr. Gladstone aroused the whole moral forces of England, in the determination that we would no longer support, as we had done some twenty years before, the continuance of the rule of the Turks in Europe. Scarcely twenty years afterward, in the last speech he made at Liverpool, his attack on the Government for not attempting to restrain Turkey from massacring Armenians led to Lord Rosebery’s resignation.

John Ruskin, when Mr. Gladstone was pronouncing his denunciation in the name of common morality, said that his solution of the problem was ‘to blow the Grand Turk compendiously into the Bosporus.’ All that was admirable in the British nation rallied round Mr. Gladstone’s denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities, and prevented England from going to war. Bulgaria was freed, and any Englishman who visits Bulgaria to-day, as I have done, finds that that great spirit, who proved that thus would we resist her oppression, is still walking up and down the mountains and plains, fast in the memories of a people who will no longer be subjected to alternate massacre and oppression.

In John Morley’s Life of that great practical idealist he inserts a quotation from his diary: ‘On Monday morning last, between four and five o’clock, I was rattling down from Euston Station through the calm and silent streets of London when there was not a footfall to disturb them. Every house looked so still that it might well have been a receptacle of the dead. But, as I came through those long lines of streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and noble thought that in every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my fellow countrymen, who, when they woke, would give many of their thoughts, ah! some of their most energetic actions, to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria.’

Could the same be said to-day of any statement by any statesman ‘rattling through the silent streets’ of Boston or New York or Philadelphia or Washington? And yet, the terrors against which Mr. Gladstone protested were terrors in a country in which we had no direct interest, to which we had sent no missionaries, in which we had not attempted to build up an English civilization. The terrors which, as Lord Bryce says, rivaled the adventures of Tamburlaine, and have cost at least two million fives (for most of the fugitives will die this winter), are terrors inflicted upon a people organized into civilized and decent life by America herself, and of whom the Christians of America might say, as Cromwell said of the slaughters of the Waldensian Valleys, that they came as near to his heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been concerned.

One American battleship might have ’compendiously blown the Turks into the Bosporus,’or a threat of it might have stayed the plague of slaughter and outrage. The influence of America, with her amazing power in finance and determination, might have arrested the whole movement. The threat was not applied; the influence was not exerted; Robert College is again in Turkish territory; and a Turkish horde, more animated with fanaticism and fury against the European compact, is now to be allowed by treaty to storm over into Europe again, and make the Balkans once more a plague-spot which will arrest all hope of the immediate peace of the world.

V

’The Turk.’ said a representative of Greece to-day in London, ‘never changes. . . . Where Turkish feet tread, the grass never grows. . . . Turkey in Europe is not an empire; it is a disease.’ These are not efforts at epigram. They are examples of the philosophy transmitted throughout the East; and they are literally true. The Turkish invasion has welled back throughout the centuries; and gradually, one after the other, Hungary, Rumania, Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria have been freed from Turkish sway. In every case, nations of peasants or of brigands have fashioned themselves into civilized people; and in every case the Turk, when he has not departed, has been treated with as much religious and social toleration as the Germans in Bohemia, or the Poles in Germany, or the Rumanians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Many people assert that there is no difference between the one and the other, and that they are all barbarians, each delighting in promiscuous massacre of its enemies. The statement is absurd. Most armies burn, outrage, and slaughter the land they invade; and the Greeks have been no exception to the rule. But the whole system and keynote of the Turkish method is to live on the taxation of Greeks and Armenians; and when these appear to be getting too strong, as they rapidly get rich, — having all the trade in their hands, — to wipe out a portion of the people by systematic massacre. You have not, therefore, to choose between allegations made by one against the other. You have to choose between two normal and recognized systems of government. In Palestine, before the war, the Turk was hated by the Mohammedan Arab at least as much as by the Christian or the Jew.

When I was in Constantinople before the war, the Turkish Governor, who was subsequently deposed by the young Turks, maintained a pleasant system of government, against which even the European ambassadors issued a protest. If he wanted a pretty girl, he sent and took her for his harem. If he wanted money, a rich Armenian merchant would receive a note saying that his contribution to finance was, say, £10,000, and if that money was not forthcoming by to-morrow, the amount would be raised to £20,000. He generally paid at the first demand. If the methods were criticized the critic would some day disappear, and his body be discovered later in the Bosporus. Such was the accepted method of Turkish rulcrship, in a city which was not Turkish at all, but had an overwhelming majority of non-Turkish residents.

The only semblance of rule of this dying empire was provided by the enlistment of foreign administrators, many of them renegades from their own faith and nation.

When I was journeying through Macedonia, after the insurrection had been suppressed with every accompaniment of outrage, violence, torture, and murder, the Governor was an Arab, Hilmi Pasha, who, I am confident, was endeavoring to arrest the orgy, which was inflamed from behind his back by Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan.

The new Turks were largely Jews, or of Jewish origin. We were passed from one governor’s house to another, and royally entertained, in Eastern fashion, by men who were mostly Albanians. The Red Sultan himself, who conducted the Armenian massacre, was half Armenian; and it was the new Turks who adopted the policy of systematic annihilation of the Christian population, in order that in future they should be bothered no more by European protests on the subject of their illtreatment. In doing this, they have, of course, committed suicide as a trading and commercial power; and, except for a scattered Turkish peasant population, the whole land will fall into decay. But this is a rich prize for one of the competing peoples of Europe, if self-government is abandoned, and the question of its future is thrown, like a torch, into a powder magazine, so far as leagues of nations or supreme councils are concerned.

And now in Europe a rich province awaits some conqueror—that Thrace from which all the Christians have fled, including Adrianople, with its deserted shops and empty houses, and reaching down to Gallipoli and the Sea of Marmora, and even to the command of the Great City itself, the prize of all the world. What stable conditions can be established under such circumstances? Thrace in itself, empty now except for the Turk, has lost all the material which made it a civilized state. It is a menace, because behind it is the Turkish army, and behind that all Anatolia, and the more developed pressure from that country by those Turks who have been left there, with all their commerce and trade willfully destroyed. The temptation is keen for men who have no other means of support to enter the armies, and for those armies to attempt to reconquer the European lands they lost only a short while ago.

The boundary is as clean as the cut of a knife. Coming down by the Orient Express from Bulgaria, you pass through a region which, before its liberation, consisted largely of waste and marshes, and which has now become a kind of garden-land of peasant cultivation, looking like a variegated chessboard of fruit and flowers and corn, because to-day ‘each man can eat of his own labor and be satisfied; and none can make him afraid.’ Directly you are over the border, you find squalor and filth, untilled land, uncared-for forest, a rich soil, but half-developed because no one would work when he knew that the fruits of his labor would go to the local governor, or into that cesspool of ineptitude and villainy which represented the Court of the Red Sultan in the capital city.

But it is difficult to imagine that Europe will tolerate the continuance of such desolation, while the Greeks and Armenians, and all Christian peoples who live under Turkish rule, are now scattered literally by the million in uncertain centres of security; with most of them piled on Greece, which has been so scandalously let down by British diplomacy, and which has no money at all to provide food and shelter and a new start in life for the refugees.

The situation is desperate, and it is Britain which is largely responsible for it. We could have compelled the Greeks to keep to the limitations laid down by the Treaty of Sevres; and, in combination with our allies, France and Italy, have ensured that that treaty should not be broken. We made no attempt at this firm action, but encouraged the Greeks to give way to wild expectation, by the provision of oratory instead of war-supplies; by announcements made by Mr. Lloyd George — quite untrue — that the Greeks had won every battle; and by the suggestion that they should not stop until they entered triumphantly Angora itself. We were left to clear up the mess alone; our allies, finding that we had refused all advice on the subject, refused to fight on the Asiatic shores of the Straits. As FranklinBouillon himself warned me, France was convinced that we intended to turn Constantinople into another Gibraltar.

We boast now that we have saved the Christian peoples, whereas we have saved none of them, and the whole American civilization in Anatolia has been utterly destroyed. We have declared in conference that we will support the return of the Turks to Europe; only the judgment of a great general, who refused to present an ultimatum to the Turkish commander, saved us from actual warfare with Turkey, without the support of a single other nation.

This mad diplomacy has brought Mr. Lloyd George and his Government tottering to the ground, when it seemed as if they were secure forever. He claims that he has assured the freedom of the Straits. The expression is meaningless; the Bosporus, a swiftly flowing salt river, so deep that ships cannot anchor in it, runs clean through the heart of Constantinople, and, to whatever power controls it, ‘the gates are theirs to open, a nd the gates are t heirs to close.’ There has never been anything but freedom for commerce and all peaceful shipping, and that freedom would continue whatever power or league was responsible for the control of the city. But if freedom means the opening of it to vessels of war, the Turks could prevent it in a moment; for one torpedo discharged from the broken-down buildings along its shores could sink the largest battleship in the world to the bottom of the sea.

‘ We are apparently to fight,’ said a cynical soldier to me, ‘in order that Russia may be allowed free access for its submarines in the Mediterranean — an enthusiastic programme for another European war.'

There is no way of getting out of this hopeless mess but by a conference of all the nations, or of the League of Nations. It is profoundly to be hoped that America will take a strong lead when any decisions come to be made: for America almost alone is disinterested so far as Constantinople is concerned. In the ‘wealthy homelands of Thrace and Anatolia,’ meanwhile, the Turk is back again; happy in being restored to power in Europe after four attempts have been made to eject him, and after he has slaughtered perhaps two million lives. He believes again that he can always trust to the foolishness of those who had declared that they would protect his subject peoples, because in the end each would seek his own material interests, regardless of the claim of the ideal.