If they had not had the moral and military support of Germany, the
Young Turks would never have been able to wage this final campaign of
extermination upon every element of good in the countries and the peoples
that are in their power. But it is not mere chance that the Turks and
Germans have come together for these unholy ends.
In pursuing her ambition, Germany has found invaluable instruments in
the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. These States would be anachronisms in
a free democratic Europe, and were destined, if all went well with the
world’s development, to be transformed into willing federations or else
to dissolve into their constituent peoples. But neither federalisation
nor dissolution suited the interest of the tyrannous minority which has
so far dominated and exploited each of these Empires for its own selfish
purposes. In the Hapsburg Empire the tyrants are the corrupt Magyar
aristocracy, which dominates Hungary, and through Hungary the Empire as a
whole. In the Ottoman Empire they are the Young Turks, a secret society
with its central committee at Constantinople and branch committees in the
provinces, and with a gang of sordid adventurers as their puppets in the
nominal headship of what professes to be a democratic government.
The Young Turks and the Magyar Oligarchy saw that the guarantee of
Prussia, and that alone, could preserve their tyranny against the
progress of Democracy in Europe. The Prussians saw that the Turks and
Magyars could sell them 70,000,000 human beings for “canonen futter,” in
addition to the 70,000,000 Germans, Poles, Alsatians and Danes whom they
already possessed. This extra 70,000,000 seemed to put world dominion
within their reach. The bargain was struck, and the War was made under
which the whole world is suffering, and must still suffer for a season,
if liberty is to be saved and the evil of centuries to be brought to a
tardy end.
There is no possibility of returning to the _Status Quo_ before August
1914—first, because the _Status Quo_ under the Turks was itself the mere
perpetuation of an oppression and a misery that disgraced the civilised
world, and that should have been ended long before; and secondly, because
it has been made unspeakably worse during the War than it was before it.
Every element of good that had maintained its existence under Turkish
government, and that made less intolerable a system that in itself
was too wicked to survive, is being stamped out now by deportation,
spoliation, abduction and massacre. The evil has purged itself altogether
of the good. Turkish tyranny has been stimulated by the German alliance
into an unnatural vitality, and the Central Confederates dream of putting
the clock in South-Eastern Europe a century back. Debauching one of the
Balkan States by gorging her with spoil from the rest, they hope to stamp
out liberty in the Balkans altogether, to reconquer for Militarism the
field which the 19th century won here for Democracy, and to build over it
a bridge by which three tyrant peoples, the Prussian, the Magyar and the
Turk, shall join hands in dominating and destroying without interference
a multitude of smaller and weaker peoples from Alsace to Rumania and from
Schleswig to Baghdad.
It is not a question of ameliorating the _Status Quo_. The _Status Quo_
in Turkey, irremediable before, is being actively changed into something
infinitely worse, and this is being accomplished, behind the bulwark of
Militarism, under the eyes of the civilised world....