No one who has studied the history of the Near East for the last five
centuries will be surprised that the Allied Powers have declared their
purpose to put an end to the rule of the Turk in Europe, and still
less will he dissent from their determination to deliver the Christian
population of what is called the Turkish Empire, whether in Asia or in
Europe, from a Government which during those five centuries has done
nothing but oppress them. These changes are indeed long overdue. They
ought to have come more than a century ago, because it had then already
become manifest that the Turk was hopelessly unfit to govern, with any
approach to justice, subject races of a different religion. The Turk
has never been of any use for any purpose except fighting. He cannot
administer, though in his earlier days he had the sense to employ
intelligent Christian administrators. He cannot secure justice. As a
governing power, he has always shown himself incapable, corrupt and
cruel. He has always destroyed; he has never created.
Those whom we call the Turks are not a nation at all in the proper
sense of the word. The Ottoman Turks were a small conquering tribe from
Central Asia, ruled during the first two centuries of their conquests by
a succession of singularly able and unscrupulous Sultans, who subjugated
the Christian populations of Asia Minor and South-Eastern Europe,
compelling part of these populations to embrace Mohammedanism, and
supporting their own power by seizing the children of the rest, forcibly
converting them to Islam, and making out of them an efficient standing
army, the Janizaries, by whose valour and discipline the Turkish wars
of conquest were carried on from early in the fifteenth down into the
nineteenth century. As a famous English historian wrote, the Turks are
nothing but a robber band, encamped in the countries they have desolated.
As Edmund Burke wrote, the Turks are savages, with whom no civilised
Christian nation ought to form any alliance.
Turkish rule ought to be ended in Europe, because, even in that
small part of it which the Sultan still holds, it is an alien power,
which has in that region been, and is now, oppressing or massacring,
slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population of
Greek or Bulgarian stock. It ought to be turned out of the western coast
regions of Asia Minor for a like reason. The people there are largely,
perhaps mostly, Greek-speaking Christians. So ought it to be turned
out of Constantinople, a city of incomparable commercial and political
importance, with the guardianship of which it is unfit to be trusted. So
ought it to be turned out of Armenia and Cilicia, and Syria, where within
the last two years it has been destroying its Christian subjects, the
most peaceful and industrious and intelligent part of the population.
If a Turkish Sultanate is to be left in being at all, it may, with
least injury to the world, be suffered to exist in Central and Northern
Asia Minor, where the population is mainly Mussulman, and there are
comparatively few Christians—and those only in the cities—to suffer
from its misgovernment. Even there one would be sorry for its subjects,
Mussulman as well as Christian, but a weak Turkish State, such as it
would then be, could not venture on the crimes of which it has been
guilty when it was comparatively strong.
That the faults of Turkish government are incurable, has been most
clearly shown by the fact that the Young Turkish gang who gained power
when they had deposed Abd-ul-Hamid, have surpassed even that monster of
cruelty in their slaughter of the unoffending Armenians. The “Committee
of Union and Progress” began by promising equal rights to all races and
faiths. This was “Union.” It proceeded forthwith not only to expel the
Greek-speaking inhabitants of Western Asia Minor, and to exterminate the
Armenians, but to attempt to Turkify the Albanians (Muslims as well as
Christians) and to proscribe their language. This is what “Union” has in
fact meant. What “Progress” has meant in the hands of ruffians like Enver
and Talaat, Prussianised Muslims worse than the old Turkish pashas, we
have all seen within the last three years. The Muslim peasant of Asia
Minor is an honest, kindly fellow when not roused by fanaticism, but the
Turk, as a Governing Power, is irreclaimable, and the Allied Powers would
have been false to all the principles of Right and Humanity for which
they are fighting if they had not proclaimed that no Turkish Government
shall hereafter be permitted to tyrannize over subjects of another faith.