The industrial development of Turkey by this benevolent and

disinterested Power has been equally thorough and far-reaching, though

Germany here has had a certain amount of competition by Hungary to

contend against, for Hungary considered that Germany was trespassing on

her sphere of interest. But she has been able to make no appreciable

headway against her more acute partner, and her application for a

monopoly of sugar-production was not favourably received, for Germany

already had taken the beet industry well in hand. In Asia Minor the

acreage of cultivation early in 1917 had fallen more than 50 per cent.

from that under crops before the war, but owing to the importation of

machinery from the Central Powers, backed up by a compulsory

Agricultural Service Law, which has just been passed, it is hoped that

the acreage will be increased this year by something like 30 per cent.

The yield per acre also will be greatly increased this year, for Germany

has, though needing artificial manures badly herself, sent large

quantities into Turkey, where they will be more profitably employed. She

has no fear about securing the produce. This augmented yield will, it is

true, not be adequate to supply the needs of Turkey, who for the last

two years has suffered from very acute food shortage, which in certain

districts has amounted to famine and wholesale starvation of the poorer

classes. But it is unlikely that their needs will be considered at all,

for Germany's needs (she, the fairy godmother of the Pan-Turk ideal)

must obviously have the first call on such provisions as are obtainable.

Thus, in the new preserved meat factory at Aidin, the whole of the

produce is sent to Germany. Thus, too, though in February 1917 there was

a daily shortage in Smyrna of 700 sacks of flour, and the Arab and

Greek population was starving, no flour at all was allowed to be

imported into Smyrna. But simultaneously Germany was making huge

purchases of fish, meat, and flour in Constantinople (paid for in German

paper), including 100,000 sheep. Yet such was the villainous selfishness

of the famine-stricken folk at Adrianople that, when the trains

containing these supplies were passing through, a mob held them up and

sold the contents to the inhabitants. That, however, was an isolated

instance, and in any case a law was passed in October 1916, appointing a

military commission to control all supplies. It enacts that troops shall

be supplied first, and specially ordains that the requirements of German

troops come under this head. (Private firms have been expressly

prohibited from purchasing these augmented wheat supplies, but special

permission was given in 1915 to German and Austro-Hungarian societies to

buy.) A few months later we find that there are a hundred deaths daily

in Constantinople from starvation, and two hundred in Smyrna, where

there is a complete shortage of oil. But oil is still being sent to

Germany, and during 1916 five hundred reservoirs of oil were sent there,

each containing up to 15,000 kilogrammes. Similarly during this summer

the price of fruit has gone up in Smyrna, for the Germans have reopened

certain factories for preserving it and turning it into jam, which is

being sent to Germany. The sugar is supplied from the new beet-fields of

Konia. But Kultur must be supplied first, else Kultur would grow lean,

and the Turkish God of Love will look after the Smyrniotes. It is no

wonder that the blockade of Germany does not produce the desired result

a little quicker, for food is already pouring in from Turkey, and when

the artificial manures have produced their early harvest the stream will

become a torrent.[1]

[Footnote 1: The harvest has now come in, and is most abundant.]

But during all these busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not

only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the

Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly

increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. The

great irrigation works at Konia, begun several years ago, are in

operation, and the revenues of the irrigated villages have been doubled.

In fact, as the report lately issued says, 'a new and fertile province

has been formed by the aid of German energy and knowledge.' At Adana are

similar irrigation works, financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marré

gives us a most hopeful survey of them, for Adana was already linked up

with the Bagdad Railway in October 1916, which was to be the great

artery connecting Germany with the East. There is some considerable

shortage of labour there (owing in part to the Armenian massacres, to

which we shall revert presently), but the financial arrangements are in

excellent shape. The whole of the irrigation works are in German hands,

and have been paid for by German paper; and to get the reservoirs, etc.,

back into her own control, it has been agreed that Turkey, already

completely bankrupt, will have to pay not only what has been spent, but

a handsome sum in compensation; while, as regards shortage of labour,

prisoners have been released in large numbers to work without pay. This

irrigation scheme at Adana will increase the cotton yield by four times

the present crop, so we learn from the weekly Arab magazine, _El Alem el

Ismali_, which tells us also of the electric-power stations erected

there.

The same paper (October 1916) announces to the Anatolian merchants that

transport is now easy, owing to the arrival of engines and trucks from

Germany, while _Die Zeit_ (February 1917) prophesies a prosperous future

for this Germano-Turkish cotton combine. Hitherto Turkey has largely

imported cotton from England; now Turkey--thanks to German capital on

terms above stated--will, in the process of internal development so

unselfishly devised for her by Germany, grow cotton for herself, and be

kind enough to give a preferential tariff to Germany.

A similarly bright future may be predicted for the sugar-beet industry

at Konia, where are the irrigation works already referred to. Artesian

wells have been sunk, and there is the suggestion to introduce

Bulgarian labour in default of Turkish. As we have seen, Hungary

attempted to obtain a monopoly with regard to sugar, but Germany has

been victorious on this point (as on every other where she competes with

Hungary), and has obtained the concession for a period of thirty years.

She reaped the first-fruits this last spring (1917), when, on a single

occasion, 350 trucks laden with sugar were despatched to Berlin. A

similar irrigation scheme is bringing into cultivation the Makischelin

Valley, near Aleppo, and Herr Wied has been appointed as expert for

irrigation plant in Syria. There has been considerable shortage of coal,

but now more is arriving from the Black Sea, and the new coal-fields at

Rodosto will soon be giving an output.

Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the industries and economical

developments of Turkey over which Germany has not at the present moment

got the control than those over which she has. In particular she has

shown a parental interest in Turkish educational questions. She

established last year, under German management, a school for the study

of German in Constantinople; she has put under the protection of the

German Government the Jewish institution at Haifa for technical

education in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of schoolmasters has been

sent to Germany for the study of German methods. Ernst Marré surmises

that German will doubtless become compulsory even in the Turkish

intermediate (secondary) schools. In April 1917, the first stone of the

'House of Friendship' was laid at Constantinople, the object of which

institution is to create among Turkish students an interest in

everything German, while earlier in the year arrangements were made for

10,000 Turkish youths to go to Germany to be taught trades. These I

imagine were unfit for military service. With regard to such a scheme

Halil Haled Bey praises the arrangement for the education of Turks in

Germany. When they used to go to France, he tells us, 'they lost their

religion' (certainly Prussian Got is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) 'and

returned home unpatriotic and useless. In Germany they will have access

to suitable religious literature' (Gott!) 'and must adopt all they see

good in German methods without losing their original characteristics.'

Comment on this script is needless. The hand is the hand of Halil Haled

Bey, but the voice is the voice of Potsdam. Occasionally, but rarely,

Austrian competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an Austrian

quarterly review, shows jealousy of German influence, and we find, in

October 1916, an Ottoman-Austrian college started at Vienna for 250

pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Germany has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana

(where are the German irrigation works) the German-Turkish Society has

opened a German school of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish

have been organised at Berlin for the sake of future German colonists.

In Constantinople the _Tanin_ announces a course of lectures to be held

by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Professor von Marx discoursed

last April on foreign influence and the development of nations, with

special reference to Turkey and the parallel case of Germany. A few

months later we find Hilmet Nazim Bey, official head of the Turkish

press, proceeding to Berlin to learn German press methods. A number of

editors of Turkish papers will follow him, and soon, no doubt, the

Turkish press will rival Cologne and Frankfort.

So much for German education, but her penetrative power extends into

every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich

expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic

society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German

instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was

made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of

Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their

acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for

silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the

railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase.

Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British),

with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession,

with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the

Mersina-Adana Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad Railway;

they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, built with French capital.

They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby

controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the

interior of Asia Minor.[1] Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels

of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven

motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. Meanwhile

railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German

control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August 1916) allocated a

large sum of German paper money for the construction of ordinary roads,

military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey,

but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is

being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all

political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior,

for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition

needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and

door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron railings along the Champs

de Mars at Pera have been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. Not

long after eight truck-loads of copper were sent to Germany: these, I

imagine, represent the first produce of copper roofs and utensils. A

Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in January of this year,

permits subjects of one country to settle in the other while retaining

their nationality and enjoying trading and other privileges. In Lebanon

Dr. König has opened an agricultural school for Syrians of all

religions. In the Homs district the threatening plague of locusts in

February 1917 was combatted by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. Bucher,

had been already sent to superintend the whole question. For this

concerns supplies to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed in the

same month that two-thirds of all fish caught in the Lebanon district

should be given to the military authorities (these are German), and that

every fish weighing over six ounces in the Beirut district should be

Korban also. The copper mines at Arghana Maden, near Diarbekr, are busy

exporting their produce into Germany; the coal-mines at Rodosto will

very soon be making a large output.[2]

[Footnote 1: The balance-sheets for 1916 of certain of those railways in

which the Deutsche Bank has an interest have come to hand. They show a

very disagreeable degree of prosperity. The Anatolia Railway Company has

large profits with a gross revenue of 25,737,995 marks. The profit on

the Haidar-Pasha-Angora Line has risen from 42,566 francs per kilometre

to 45,552. The Mersina-Tarsus-Adana Railway has paid 6 per cent. on its

preference shares, and 3 per cent. on its ordinary shares. The Haidar

Pasha Harbour Company has paid 8 per cent.]

[Footnote 2: Later in this year we find three trains daily leaving

Constantinople for Germany, laden with coal and military supplies.]

There is no end to this penetration: German water-seekers, with divining

and boring apparatus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into Sinai;

Russian prisoners were sent by Germany for agricultural work in Asia

Minor, to take the place of slaughtered Armenians; a German-Turkish

treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives the whole reorganisations of the

economic system to a special German mission. A Stuttgart journal chants

a characteristic _Lobgesang_ over this feat. 'That is how,' it proudly

exclaims, 'we work for the liberation of peoples and nationalities.'

In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, German legal reforms were

introduced in December 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and in the

same month all the Turks in telegraph offices in Constantinople were

replaced by Germans. Ernst Marré gives valuable advice to young Germans

settling in Turkey. He particularly recommends them, knowing how

religion is one of the strongest bonds in this murderous race, to 'trade

in articles of devotion, in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran,' and

points out what good business might be built up in gramophones. Earlier

in this year we find a 'German Oriental Trading Company' founded for the

import of fibrous materials for needs of military authorities, and a

great carpet business established at Urfa with German machinery that

will supplant the looms of Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established

at Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is rewarded with an Iron

Cross and a Turkish decoration. The afforestation near Constantinople,

ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture, is put into German hands, and in

the vilayet of Aidin (April 1916) ninety concessions were granted to

German capitalists to undertake the exploitation of metallic ores.

Occasionally the German octopus finds it has gone too far for the

moment, and releases some struggling limb of its victim, as, for

instance, when we see that, in September 1916, the German Director's

stamp for the 'Imperial German Great Radio Station' at Damascus has been

discarded temporarily, as that station 'should be treated for the

present as a Turkish concern.'

A 'Trading and Weaving Company' was established at Angora in 1916, an

'Import and Export Company' at Smyrna, a 'Trading and Industrial

Society' at Beirut, a 'Tobacco Trading Company' at Latakieh, an

'Agricultural Company' at Tripoli, a 'Corn Exporting Company' in

Lebanon, a 'Rebuilding Commission' (perhaps for sacked Armenian houses)

at Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist's Guide Book--a Baedeker,

in fact--for travellers in Anatolia, and the erection of a monument in

honour of Turkish _women_ who have replaced men called up for military

duty. Truly these last two items--a guide-book for Anatolia, and a

monument to women--are strange enterprises for Turks. A new Prussian day

is dawning, it seems, for Turkish women as well, for the _Tanin_ (April

1917) tells us that diplomas are to be conferred on ladies who have

completed their studies in the Technical School at Constantinople.

It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but

given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with

tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none

round which it has not cast its feelers--no Semitic moneylender ever

obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military,

educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold.

Turkey's life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it

has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among

all the Great Powers of Europe, invested their time and their money in

the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and skilfully they

worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha

bamboozled us. As long as he was of service to them they retained him;

for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in

Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him. But

now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little

autocratic, and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal.

So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had

not noticed the transformation. Talaat Bey has taken his place; it was

he who, in May 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King

Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who was the mouthpiece of

the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. Under Czardom,

he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the

revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires

territorial annexation. And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia's

friend! Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of favour in Berlin,

and I cannot but think it curious that when, on April 2, 1917, he

visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very nearly killed

in a motor accident. But it may have been an accident. Since then I

cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals

than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town, and lecture the

Central Committee of the Young Turks on the subject of internal affairs

in Great Britain. I do not like lectures, but I should have liked to

hear that one.

I have left to the end of this chapter the question of Germany's

knowledge of, and complicity in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune

of the Reichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial

of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent

occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish

internal affairs.

In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to

Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these

statements may be called insincere. But the denial of the massacres is a

deliberate lie. Germany--official Germany--knew all about them, and she

permitted them to go on. A few proofs of this are here shortly stated.

(1) In September 1915, four months before the denial of the massacres

was made in the Reichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade teacher in

the German Technical School at Aleppo, prepared and sent, as we have

seen, in his name, and that of several of his colleagues, a report of

the massacres to the German Embassy at Constantinople. In that report he

gives a terrible account of what he has seen with his own eyes, and also

states that the country Turks' explanation with regard to the origin of

these measures is that it was 'the teaching of the Germans.' The German

Embassy at Constantinople therefore knew of the massacres, and knew

also that the Turks attributed them to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage

also consulted, before sending his report, with the German Consul at

Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told him that the German Embassy had been

already advised in detail about the massacres from the consulates at

Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, but that he welcomed a further protest

on the subject.

(2) These reports, or others like them, had not gone astray, for in

August 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Wangenheim,

made a formal protest to the Turkish Government about the massacres.

There is, then, no doubt that the German Government, when it officially

denied the massacres, was perfectly cognisant of them. It was also

perfectly capable of stopping them, for they were not local violences,

but wholesale murders organised at Constantinople. In support of this

view I find an independent witness stating that 'there is no Turk of

standing who will not readily declare that it would have been perfectly

possible for Germany to have vetoed the massacres had she chosen.'

Germany had indeed already given assurances that such massacres should

not occur. She had assured the Armenian Katholikos at Adana that so long

as Germany has any influence in Turkey he need not fear a repetition of

the horrors that had taken place under Abdul Hamid. Had she, then, no

influence in Constantinople, or how was it that she had obtained

complete control over all Turkish branches of government? The same

assurance was given by the German Ambassador in April 1915, to the

Armenian Patriarch and the President of the Armenian National Council.

So, in support of the Pan-Turkish ideal, and in the name of the Turkish

Allah, the God of Love, Germany stood by and let the infamous tale of

lust and rapine and murder be told to its end. The Turks had planned to

exterminate the whole Armenian race except some half-million, who would

be deported penniless to work on agricultural developments under German

rule, but this quality of Turkish mercy was too strained for Major

Pohl, who proclaimed that it was a mistake to spare so many. But he was

a soldier, and did not duly weigh the claims of agriculture.

The choice was open to Germany; Germany chose, and let the Armenian

massacres go on. But she was in a difficulty. What if the Turkish

Government retorted (perhaps it did so retort), 'You are not consistent.

Why do you mind about the slaughter of a few Armenians? What about

Belgium and your atrocities there?'

And all the ingenuity of the Wilhelmstrasse would not be able to find an

answer to that.

I do not say that Germany wanted the massacres, for she did not. She

wanted more agricultural labour, and I think that, if only for that

reason, she deprecated them. But she allowed them to go on when it was

in her power to stop them, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash

clean her hand from that stinking horror.

Here, then, are some of the problems which those who, at the end of the

war, will have to deal with the problem of Turkey must tackle. It is

just as well to recognise that at the present moment Turkey is virtually

and actually a German colony, and the most valuable colony that Germany

has ever had. It will not be enough to limit, or rather abolish, the

supremacy of Turkey over aliens and martyrised peoples; it will be

necessary first to abolish the supremacy of Germany over Turkey. To do

this the victory of our Allied Nations must be complete, and Germany's

octopus envelopment of Turkish industries severed. Otherwise we shall

immediately be confronted with a Germany that already reaches as far as

Mesopotamia. That is done now; and that, before there can come any

permanent peace for Europe, must be undone. Nothing less than the

complete release of that sucker and tentacle embrace will suffice.

NOTE

As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in the Armenian

massacres, the following is of interest. It is known that when

Metternich succeeded Wangenheim as German Ambassador in Constantinople,

he brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, by the Kaiser's

orders, he was to read when presenting his credentials to the Sultan.

This contained a sentence which implied that Germany had been unable to

stop the Armenian massacres. Talaat refused to allow the speech to be

read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the massacres on

to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took

place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans.

Eventually a compromise was arrived at, and the speech _in toto_ was

read privately, the part referring to the Armenian massacre not being

published.... It is a pity that Germany is always found out....

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VI_

'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'

Let us commit the crime of _lèse-majesté_, and assume (though the

Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany

is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in

possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in anticipation of

the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of

Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely

recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature,

for it shows what Europe was to have been like in 1916, and the

apportionments are not borne out by facts. But assuming that there is

some radical error about it all from her point of view, and assuming

that there will not be either a conclusive peace favourable to Prussian

interests, or even an inconclusive peace, but one in which the Allies

will be able to dictate and enforce their own terms, the magnitude of

the problems that will await their decision may well appal the most

ingenious of their statesmen. And of all those problems none, it is safe

to prophesy, will be found more difficult of solution than that which

will deal with the future of the corrupt and barbarous Government which

has for centuries made hell of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less

what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to Belgium, to the Trentino,

because in those cases the claims of one or other of our Allies to

demand a particular settlement are quite certain to be agreed to by

those not so immediately and vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these

problems will be more complicated because of conflicting interests, and

most complicated of all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, is

certain, that there can be no going back to the conditions that existed

there before the war.

Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter Asia into the Nearer East

and into Europe, the government of their Empire has gone from bad to

worse. In the early days, as we have seen, their policy was to absorb

the strength of their subject peoples by incorporating the youth of them

into the Turkish army, by giving them Turkish wives, and by converting

them to Mohammedanism. Such was the foundation of the Empire and such

its growth. But having absorbed their strength, the Sultan's Government

neglected them until they milked them again. They were allowed to

prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their

strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands

they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on

such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay,

and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in

order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of

absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing

them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the

policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a

scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpassed the killings of

Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the

deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of

it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and

similar measures have been planned and indeed begun, against the Greeks,

the Arabs, and the Jews.

In consequence of this, in consequence also of the European War, the

policy of the Balance of Power as regards Turkey has been at length

abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared in their joint note to

President Wilson their aims in the war, and for those they have pledged

themselves to fight until final and complete victory wreathes their

arms. Among these aims are:--

(1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous

tyranny of the Turks.

(2) The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved

itself so radically alien to Western civilisation.

For a century that most inharmonious of orchestras called the Concert

of Europe has, owing to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept

Turkey together, and in particular has maintained the centre of its

government at Constantinople simply because the Balance of Power would

be upset if anybody else held the key of the straits that separate

Russia from the Mediterranean. England, above all others, was

instrumental in preserving that precarious Balance, and England now must

confess the utter failure of her policy there throughout a century. It

is humiliating to acknowledge the complete collapse of that which for so

many decades has been the keystone of our ruling with regard to our

Eastern Empire, but the arch has collapsed; Germany pulled the keystone

out, and all our efforts to exclude Russia from free access to the

Mediterranean have only resulted in letting Germany in. To-day she holds

Constantinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. The situation, as

it stands at this moment, is infinitely worse than it could have been

for a century back, if at any moment during those hundred years we had

done what we always ought to have done, and declared that the

anachronism of Turkey being in Europe was more intolerable than anything

that could happen in consequence of her expulsion. But we have

acknowledged that now. We have also acknowledged the even greater

anachronism of Turkey being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any

of those peoples who inhabit the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for

the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these

two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war,

which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any

cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and

Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years.

And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields

that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the

Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of

Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople

and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of

that murderous tyranny for ever.

We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try

to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the

confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great

crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite

useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within

the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians

shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a

century's failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for

instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the

Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every

Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them.

The _soi-disant_ protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in

securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to

bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable

yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations,

which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples

in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of

covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to

repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be

hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, _ipso

facto_, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of

whom such a province is placed.

The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at

first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such

a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even

the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar

adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years.

The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and

finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern

Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity,

they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more

peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began,

and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre

in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more

massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will

be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples

dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or

other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a

protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of

interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and

independent provinces.

The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most

atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is

fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the

reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that

the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old

Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian

Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by

Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest

of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling,

such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and

probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as

survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their

professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the

Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a

million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and

partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were

largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been

appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be

evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without

exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts

near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing

Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly

suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the

claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as

Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated

by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous

condition in a new protected province, which will include all the

vilayets of Armenia.

There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done,

and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn

promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their

aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious

people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries

of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their

re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will,

beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. As a

nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits;

but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent)

are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate

to towns. Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again,

where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their

nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine,

and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch.

They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that

will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.

In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than

the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as so

often before, showed themselves so nobly disregardant of all personal

danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who

have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work. With

regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be

remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on the plains and towns of

Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was

encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of massacre. Out of

those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia

from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey

presently to be defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though not in

the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often assisted.

The Armenians who will thus be reinstated within the boundaries of their

own territory, will be practically penniless and without any of the

means or paraphernalia of life, and the necessary outlay on supplies for

them, and the cost of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on the

protecting Power. They will, however, be free from the taxes they have

hitherto paid to the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them by

means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an adequate interest on the

moneys expended on them. These would thus take the form of a very small

loan, the whole of which could easily be repaid by the Armenians in the

course of a generation or so. Once back on their own soil, and free from

Turkish tyranny and the possibility of it, they are bound to prosper,

even as they have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions and

massacres up till the year 1915, when, as we have seen, the liberal and

progressive Nationalists organised and executed the extermination from

which so few escaped.

It is hardly necessary to point out who the protecting Power would be in

the case of the repatriated Armenians, for none but Russia is either

desirable or possible. With one side along the Russian frontier of

Trans-Caucasia, the New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere of

Russian influence.

It has been suggested that not only Armenia proper, but part of Cilicia

should also become a district of the repatriated Armenians, with an

outlet to the sea. But while it is true that complete compensation would

demand this, since Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were almost

pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think that such a restoration is

desirable. For, in the first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis

(as carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically complete. All the

men were slaughtered, and it does not seem likely that any of the women

and girls who were deported reached the 'agricultural colony' of

Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian desert. It is therefore difficult to see of

whom the repatriation would consist. In the second place, the New

Armenia will be for several generations to come of an area more than

ample for all the Armenians who have survived the flight into Russia,

and it obviously will give them the best chance of corporate prosperity,

if the whole of them are repatriated in a compact body rather than that

a portion of them should be formed into a mere patch severed from their

countrymen by so large a distance. Another sphere of influence also will

be operating near the borders of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians

under two protecting Powers would have serious disadvantages. In

addition they never were a sea-going people, and I cannot see what

object would be served by giving them a coast-board. In any case, if a

coast-board was found necessary, the most convenient would be the

coast-board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their main territory.

If it seems clear that for New Armenia the proper protecting Power is

Russia, it is no less clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria,

Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting Power is France.

Historically France's connection with Syria dates from the time of the

Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, and of late years the ties

between the two countries have been both strengthened and multiplied.

The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San Stefano, and of Berlin have all

recognised the affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical standpoint,

have the encyclicals of Leo XIII. in 1888 and 1898. Similarly, it was

France who intervened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who landed troops

for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a

protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up

till the outbreak of the European War. France was the largest holder, as

she was also the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the harbour of

Beirut, without doubt destined to be one of the most flourishing ports

of the Eastern Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise. And perhaps

more important than all these, as a link between Syria and France, has

been the educational penetration which France has effected there. What

the American missionaries did for Armenia, France has done for Syria,

and according to a recent estimate, of the 65,000 children who attended

European schools throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended French

schools. When we consider that that proportion has been maintained for

many years in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the intellectual

bond between the Syrian and the French now is. The French language,

similarly, is talked everywhere: it is as current as is modern Greek in

ports of the Levant.

In virtue of such claims few, if any, would dispute the title of France

to be the protecting Power in the case of Syria. Here there will not

be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be

done. Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the

Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot,

and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that

barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical

sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which

will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.

It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French

protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there

will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later,

with regard to railway control. Northwards and eastwards the natural

delimitations seem clear enough: northwards French Syria would terminate

with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert

marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the

course of the Euphrates. But southwards there is no such natural line of

demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches

the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the

Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip

of territory lies Palestine.

Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable

territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any

other course are many and insuperable. Should the line of French

influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection

is the intervening territory to be left? At present it is Turkish, but

inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their

declaration not to leave alien peoples under the 'murderous tyranny' of

the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both by geographical situation

and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there

seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes

under if not under the French. Just as properly, if we take this view of

the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to

Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah. That

the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same

control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the

sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any

canal corresponding to that of Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea

_via_ the Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion of French influence

in the Near East would see no objection to this rectified frontier.

There is no question of competition involved. The proposed change is but

a rational rectification of the present status.

This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine inset into the French

protectorate of Syria, and it is difficult to see to whom the

protectorate of Palestine should be properly assigned except to France.

Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean;

England's national sphere of influence in this partition of the

districts now occupied by alien peoples in the Ottoman Empire lies

obviously elsewhere; and since the Jews, who settled in ever-increasing

numbers in Palestine before the war, and will assuredly continue to

settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian

Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to assign to Russia the

protectorate of her own refugees. The only other alternative would be to

create an independent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons against

that are overwhelming. It would be merely playing into the hands of

Germany to make such an arrangement. For the last thirty years Germany

has watched with personal and special interest this immigration of Jews

into Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but a German

expansion. Indeed, when, in the spring of this year, as we have noticed,

a massacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal,

Germany so far reversed her usual attitude towards massacres in general,

and her expressed determination never to interfere in Turkey's internal

affairs, as to lodge a peremptory protest, and of course got the

persecution instantly stopped. Her reason was that Pan-Turkish 'ideals'

(the equivalent for the massacre of alien people) had no sort of

meaning in Palestine. But the Pan-Germanic ideals had a great deal of

meaning in Palestine, as Dr. Davis Treitsch _(Die Jüden der Türkei)_

very clearly states. For 'as a result of the war,' he tells us, 'there

will be an emigration of East-European Jews on an unprecedented scale

... the disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany

(and) Germans will be only too glad to find a way out in the emigration

of those Jews to Turkey, a solution extraordinarily favourable to the

interests of all _three [sic]_ parties concerned. There are grounds for

talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry.'

Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate

over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left

independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her

penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and

will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their

cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent

financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid,

Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as

to the quarter from which that financial assistance will be forthcoming,

on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine

is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end

of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as

complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the

Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a

strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with

an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the

blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For

great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during

the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the

spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about

120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the

cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their

work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be

without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A

protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against

that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the

Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the

Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be

completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or

other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act

of war.

The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French

protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of

the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other

Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can

fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper

sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards

from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each

other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very

well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India,

and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost,

by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of

world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should

never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no

means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated

here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen,

England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in

a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still

might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a

huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany,

in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged

screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of

Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much

as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of

realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her

pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right--she usually is right in

these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical--for she seems

dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was

the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she

guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work

and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we

may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris

and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as

Dr. Rohrbach points out in his _Bagdadbahn_, needs only the guarantee of

security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the

hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under

a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of

property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread

and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely

fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has

left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life.

The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will

naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny

that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land

lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility,

yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its

sparse population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three

months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it

was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the

life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than

it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon

the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these

desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that

now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain

of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug canals, they made reservoirs, and

harnessed like some noble horse of the gods the torrents that now gallop

unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then

the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested

and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat

and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the

blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the

revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the

statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its

amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might

of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the canals still regulated

the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a

thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in

cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities

numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad

enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a

fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell

therein.'

But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not

diminished; the Turks could not dispose of that by massacre, as a means

of weakening the strength of their subject peoples. It is still there,

ready to respond to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphrates,

which once, when handled and controlled, caused it to be the Garden of

the Lord.

Not long before the present European War Sir William Willcocks, under

whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at Assouan were

constructed, was appointed adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public

Works, and his report on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was issued in

1911. He tells us that the whole of this delta of the Sawad is capable

of easy levelling and reclamation. It would naturally be a gigantic

scheme, and he takes as a basis to start on the question of the

refertilisation of 4,000,000 acres. Into the details of it we need not

go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thoroughly conservative basis,

give the following results. He proposes to restore, of course with

modern technical improvements, the old system of canals, and, allowing

for interest on loans, estimates the total expense at £26,000,000 (or

the cost of the war for about three days). On this the annual value of

the crops would pay 31 per cent. The figures need no enlargement in

detail and no comment.

But now comes the difficulty: the construction of the irrigation works

is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and 'the ancient

river,' the river Euphrates, run their course. But all the irrigation

works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain

for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops. A

million are necessary: where are they to come from? And the answer is

'Egypt and India.'

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future

must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with

hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose _Bagdadbahn_ I

have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution

to the man-power problem except by the 'introduction of Mohammedans from

other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.' It is

true that he starts upon the assumption that Mesopotamia will remain

Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines),

with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite

correct. Even under German protection he realises that citizens of

well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves

under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of

Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia

from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Their numbers are even

more inadequate since the Armenian massacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach's

Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen

forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad. He does not

positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the

man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses

it. His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him

state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but

that, I feel sure, is his vision: 'he sees it, but not now; he beholds

it, but not nigh.'

But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since

for the English it is clearly more easily realisable. The native labour

we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a

million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty.

But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the

solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power

of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already

bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world. And I cannot do

better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of

reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very noble words

from Sir William Willcocks's report, in which he speaks of the

desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked

stewardship.

'The last voyage I made before coming to this country was up the Nile

from Khartoum to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and

forbidding region I was filled with pride to think I belonged to a race

whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling

in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees

and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the

conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I

have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day

represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had

thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands God has placed,

for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my

countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the

exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste

themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating

everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey

can make can be too great to roll away the reproach of those parched and

weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven.'

But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gathered in, must needs be

transported, and for that railways are necessary. Water transport would,

of course, carry them easily down to the Persian Gulf, but the supply

will be mainly, if not wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be conveyed

to the shores of the Mediterranean. Already, in preparation for

world-conquest, Germany has proceeded far with her construction of the

Bagdad Railway, which was intended, after her absorption of Turkey, to

link up Berlin with her next Oriental objective, namely, India; the

Taurus has been tunnelled, the Euphrates bridged, and but for a hiatus

of a few miles the line is practically complete from Constantinople into

Northern Mesopotamia. But its route was chosen for German strategic

reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Constantinople and Bagdad.

This, it may be permitted to say, does not form part of the schemes of

the Allies: it is to snap rather than weld such links that they have

taken the field. What we want in the matter of railway transport for the

harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our Eastern communications,

is not a line that passes through Turkish and German soil, and

terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the directest possible

land-route, reaches the Mediterranean and terminates in suitable ports.

The reader therefore is requested to _unthink_ the present Bagdad

Railway altogether, to 'scrap' it in his mind, as it will be probably

scrapped on the map, since it is utterly useless for our purposes. For

taking Aleppo as (roughly) the half-way house in the existent line, we

find that the western half of it lies in Asia Minor, in territory which,

as we shall see, will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it makes

a long detour instead of striking directly for Bagdad. After our

experience with Turkey there is nothing less conceivable than that we

should allow a single mile of our new Mesopotamia Railway to run

through the territory of the Turks, for who knows that she might not

(say when harvests are ripe and ready for delivery), on any arbitrary

pretext, close or destroy the line, even as before now she has closed

the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, a line that goes to

Constantinople (in whosoever hands Constantinople may be after the war)

is out of the way and altogether unsuitable. Eastwards, again, from

Aleppo the present Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, admirably

adapted to the German purposes for which it was constructed, but utterly

unadapted to ours.

Let us then 'scrap' the existent Bagdad route altogether, and consider

not what the Germans want, but what we want, which, as has been already

stated, is a direct land communication with suitable Mediterranean

ports. Of those there are three obvious ones, Alexandretta, Tripoli, and

Beirut, of which Beirut is a long way the first in importance and

potentiality of increased importance. Two possible routes therefore

would seem to suggest themselves, one running from Alexandretta to

Aleppo, and thence following pretty closely the course of the Euphrates

till it reaches Hit, and from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo

is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina (the actual port of

Tripoli), and also with Beirut by branch lines making a junction at

Homs, and thus all those ports will be brought together on one system.

But if the reader will glance at the map, he will see that by far the

most direct communication with Bagdad would be to run the railway direct

from there to Homs, thus making Homs rather than Aleppo the central

junction of the system. From Homs lines would run northward to Aleppo,

due west to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either of those routes,

in any case, would be infinitely preferable to the long loop which the

present Bagdad Railway traverses, as planned on German lines and for

German requirements. The new railway will thus lie exclusively in

territory under French and English protectorate, and will probably be

their joint enterprise and property.

Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment of the solemn pledge of

the Allies to liberate subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of the

Turks, we have discussed the future of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine,

and of Mesopotamia. All those are well defined districts, and the

demarcation of their respective protectorates should not present great

difficulties. But there remains, before we pass on to the problem of

Constantinople, a further district less easily defined, largely

inhabited by European peoples whose liberty in the future we are pledged

to secure. This is the Mediterranean coastline to the south and west of

Asia Minor, the towns of which have been so extensively peopled and made

prosperous by Greeks and Italians. Similarly among those of our European

Allies who are desirous and capable of Eastern expansion, there remains

one, Italy, whose rights to partake in this Turkish partition we have

not yet considered. In the shifting kaleidoscope of national

war-politics, it seems at the moment of writing by no means impossible

that Greece, having at length got rid of a treacherous and unstable

Reuben of a monarch, may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, no

doubt, she too would state the terms of her desired and legitimate

expansion. But these would more reasonably be concerned with the

redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which does not come within the

scope of this book, and we may prophesy without fear of invoking the

Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of seers, that Italy will

legitimately claim (or perhaps has already claimed) the protectorate of

this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when peace returns, the

large population of Greeks and Italians once resident (and soon again to

be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty and security which they

will never enjoy so long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the hands

that have earned the right to be protecting Power are assuredly Italian.

Along the south coast a line including the Taurus range would seem to

suggest a natural frontier inland from Adana on the east to the

south-west corner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar strip would

pass up the coast as far as, and inclusive of, Smyrna. That at least

Italy has every right to expect, and there seems no great fear that

among the International Councils there will arise a dissentient voice.

The inland boundary on the west coast is the difficult section of this

delimitation, and into the details of that it would be both rash and

inexpedient to enter.

II

We pass, then, to the second avowed object of the Allies, namely, the

expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman rule, which has proved itself so

radically alien to Western civilisation. This must be taken to include

not only the expulsion of the Turkish control from Thrace and

Constantinople, but from the eastern side as well of the Bosporus, the

Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles. At no future time must Turkey be in

a position to command even partially a single yard of that momentous

channel through which alone our Allies, Russia and Rumania, have access

to the Mediterranean. Though this was not formally stated in the Allies'

reply to President Wilson, it is clearly part and parcel of the object

in view, for while the Ottoman Empire retains the smallest control on

either side of either of the Straits, she is so far able to interfere in

European concerns, in which she must never more have a hand. The east

shore, then, of the Straits and the Sea of Marmora, as well as the west,

must be under the control of a Power, or a group of Powers, not alien to

Western civilisation. Germany and her allies therefore, no less than

Turkey, must be excluded from the guardianship of the Straits.

As we have had previous occasion to note, this ejection of the Turkish

power from Constantinople is the absolute reversal of European and, in

especial, of English policy for the last hundred years. No crime that

the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever

persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in

Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this

policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again

on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the

war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the

right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment

of full security and free economic development. But while Turkey can

close the Straits at her own arbitrary will, or at the bidding of a

superior and malevolent Power, and block the passage of ships from

Russian and Rumanian ports into the Mediterranean, the economic

development of both these countries is seriously menaced. Three times

within the last six years has she exercised that right, and while she

holds the shores of the Straits she can at any moment blockade all

southern Russian ports. That such power should be in the hands of any

nation is highly undesirable; that it should be in the hands of a

corrupt despotism like Turkey, especially now that Germany, as things

stand, can dictate to Turkey when and what she pleases, is a thing

unthinkable by the most improvident of statesmen. Already we have paid

dearly enough for the pusillanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible

that we should ever allow a similar bill to be again presented.

Whatever be the guardianship of the Straits, whoever the holder of

Constantinople, it will not be Turkey.

At the beginning of the war, and indeed till after the revolution in

Russia, it was announced and stated as an axiom that on the conclusion

of peace, Russia should be the door-keeper of what after all is her own

lodge-gate. Subsequently, in the unhappy splits and disintegration of

her Government, it was announced that she favoured peace without

annexation--in other words, that she neither claimed nor desired the

guardianship of Constantinople. But I think we should be utterly wrong

if we regarded that as an expression of the will of the Russian people:

it is far more probable that it was the expression of the will of

Germany, directly inspired by German influence with a view to concluding

a separate peace with Russia. As we have seen, it had its due effect in

Turkey, and Talaat Bey gave vent to pious ejaculations of thanksgiving,

that now all cause of quarrel with Russia was removed, and Turkey and

she could be friends. It is possible that when out of the confused

cries there again rises from Russia the clear call of the people's

voice, we shall find her wishing to set in order her own house before

she projects herself on new missions, but, as far as the manifesto of

'peace without territorial annexation' goes, we shall be wise to regard

it for the present with the profoundest suspicion. It sounds far more

like the tones of the Central European wolf than those of Little Red

Riding Hood's proper grandmother.

But be Russia's decision what it may, the Turk will hold sway no longer

in Thrace or Constantinople, or on the shores of the Straits of the Sea

of Marmora. There is, of course, no question of deporting the whole of

the Turkish population that lives in those regions, nor would it be

desirable, even if it were possible, to realise Gladstone's robust

vision of seeing every Turk, 'bag and baggage,' clear out from the

provinces they have desolated and profaned. But if not under Russia,

then under the joint control of certain of the Allied Powers there will

be a complete reconstruction of the administration of those districts.

The headquarters of the protectorate will doubtless be at

Constantinople, which will be reorganised somewhat on the lines of the

Treaty Port of Shanghai, and will be open to the ships of all nations.

The security of the town must be assured by a military garrison either

of mixed troops of the controlling nations, or possibly by a rotation of

troops drawn from the armies of each in turn. More important even than

this will be the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A naval base

must be formed, which by the gospel of the freedom of the seas (but not

according to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will constitute a

patrolling police force of the waters. Whether the system of

fortifications and defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles

impregnable shall be retained or not is a question demanding the most

careful consideration. Some will hold that they should be maintained in

order to insure that none but the guarantors of the freedom of the

Straits shall ever take possession of them: others that they shall be

utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the closing of the Straits

shall be an impossibility. The matter really turns on the question as to

the extent to which the Allies will have the prudence to cut Germany's

claws when the war is over. It is eminently to be hoped that they will

be cut so short that never again will they be able to show those

chiselled talons beyond her velvet--that sense, in fact, will allow

sentiment no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a great many people

the basis of whose character consists of a washy confidence in the good

intentions of everybody. Most mistakenly they call it Christianity.

Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the Allies' declared aims.

Such territories as Turkey holds in Europe, such control as she

possesses over the free passage of the Straits must pass from her, and

the alien peoples, who for centuries have fainted and bled underneath

her infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of bondage. As we have

seen throughout preceding chapters, it was the fixed policy of the

Ottoman Government to rid itself of their presence, and already it has

gone far in its murderous mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the

Allies, when accomplished, will do that work for her, for the Allies are

determined to remove those peoples from Turkey. The difference of

execution, however, consists in this, that they will not remove Arabs

and Greeks and Italians and Jews, as Turkey has already done with the

Armenians by the simple process of massacres, but by a process no less

simple, namely, of taking out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire

the districts where such peoples dwell. The Allies will accomplish, in

fact, for the Turks that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim of

Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim of his more murderous successors.

Turkey shall henceforth be for the Turks: she shall no more be in

'danger' from the defenceless nations, who at present exist within her

borders. The Sultan of Turkey, in some year of grace now not far

distant, will find that his Ottomanisation has been done for him, and,

though his realm is curtailed, he will have his rest broken no more by

the thought of Arab risings, nor will he have to devise measures that

will solve the Arab question. Except for a strip along the west and

south coast, all Asia Minor and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea

to the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the coast of Asia Minor,

Palestine, and Mesopotamia shall have passed from him. It is no

dismemberment of an Empire that the Allies contemplate, for they cannot

dismember limbs that never belonged to the real trunk. It was a despotic

military control that the Osmanlis had established, they always regarded

their subject peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to destroy if

they exhibited symptoms of progress and civilisation. Henceforth the

Turkish Government shall govern Turks, and Turks alone. That for many

years has been its aim, and, by the disastrous dispensation of fate, it

has been largely able to realise its purpose. Now, though by different

methods, the Allies will see thorough accomplishment of it. There will

be no question, of course, of turning out or of deporting Turks who live

in Syria, in Armenia, in Constantinople, for the ways of the Allies are

not those of Talaat and Enver and Jemal the Great. Where to-day Turks

dwell, there shall they continue to dwell, but they must dwell there in

peace in equal liberties and rights with the once-subject peoples whom

the Allies shall have delivered. If they do not like that they can

migrate, not by forced marches and under the guardianship of murderous

Kurds, but in protection and security, to the lands where they can still

enjoy the beneficent sway of their own governors, and be Ottomanised to

the top of their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and Greeks and Jews

will be Ottomanised no longer.

The Turk was always a fighter, disciplined and courageous, and he has

never lost that virtue of valour. But he has been a fighter because he

has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services,

and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will

for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the

Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been

chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who,

when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and

massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands

and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for their lords and

governors, who, until Prussia assumed command of the Turkish armies,

there will no longer be either the possibility of further conquests as

in the old Osmanli days, or, in less progressive times, the necessity

for securing Ottoman supremacy over the huge ill-knit lands which it

governed. But now, instead of having alien and defenceless tribes within

their borders, tribes forbidden to bear arms and chafing at the Turkish

yoke, they will see free peoples under the protectorates of Powers that

are capable of self-defence and, if necessary, of inflicting punishment.

Russia, France, England, Italy, all allied nations, will be established

in close proximity to the Turkish frontiers, and the New Turkey will be

as powerless for aggression as she will be for defence, should she

provoke attack. But within their borders there may the Osmanlis dwell

secure and undisturbed, so long as they conform to the habits of

civilised people with regard to their neighbours, and it is a question

whether, now that the military despotism which has always misguided the

fortunes of this people, has no possible fields for conquest, and no

need of securing security, the nation will not settle down into the

quiet existence of small neutral countries. Perhaps the last chapter of

its savage and blood-stained history is already almost finished, and in

years to come some little light of progress and of civilisation may be

kindled in the abode where the household gods for centuries have been

cruelty and hate.

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VII_

THE GRIP OP THE OCTOPUS

It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the Allies' aims as

regards Turkey to free from her barbarous control the subject peoples

dwelling within her borders, for Turkey herself has to be delivered from

a domination not less barbaric than her own, which, if allowed to

continue, would soon again be a menace to the peace of the world. We

have seen in a previous chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's

nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace envelops her, and we now have

to consider how those tentacles must be unloosed from their grip, and

what will be the condition of the victim, already bled white, when that

has been done. In the beginning, as we have seen, Germany obtained her

hold by professing a touchingly beautiful and philanthropic desire to

help Turkey to realise her national ideals, and her Pecksniffs, Tekin

Alp and Herr Ernst Marré, were bidden to write parallel histories, the

one describing the aims of the Nationalist party, the other the

benevolent interest which Germany took in them. Occasionally Herr Ernst

Marré could not but remember that he was a German, and permitted us to

see the claws of the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, but

then he pulled the strings tight again, and only loud comfortable

purrings could be heard, the Prussian musings over the 'liberation' of

Turkey which she was helping to accomplish. But nowadays, so it seems to

me, the strings have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are clearly

visible. It is not so long since Dr. Schnee, Governor of German East

Africa, sent a very illuminating document to Berlin from which I extract

the following:--

'Do you consider it possible to make a regulation prohibiting Islam

altogether? The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is

recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of

Islam....'

That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword

of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in _Alice in

Wonderland_:--

'After such kindness that would be

A dismal thing to do.'

But I am afraid that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always

done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and

the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear. She has taken the Turkish

oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes

to sit down and eat them. And did she not also interfere in the affair

of Jewish massacres and declare that 'Pan-Turkish ideals have no sort of

meaning in Palestine'? That must have been almost an unfriendly act from

Turkey's point of view, for it cannot be stated too clearly that part of

the price which Germany paid for Turkey's entry on her side into the

war, was the liberty, as far as Germany was concerned, of managing her

internal affairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the damnable

doctrines of Ottomanisation. The other Powers could not interfere, for

they failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany promised not to. That

promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited

her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the

Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is,

among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness.

Signs are not wanting that Turkey is beginning to realise the position

in which she has placed herself, namely, that of a bankrupt dependant at

the mercy of a nation to whom that quality is a mere derision. Lately a

quantity of small incidents have occurred, such as disputes over the

ownership of properties financed by Germany and the really melodramatic

depreciation in the German coinage, which unmistakably show the swift

ebb of Turkey's misplaced confidence. More significant perhaps than any

is a transaction that took place in May 1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver

Pasha took the whole of their private fortunes out of the Deutsche Bank

in Constantinople, and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely, the

Banque Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Fédérale: they drew out also

the whole funds of the Committee of Union and Progress, and similarly

transferred them. This operation was not effected without loss, for in

return for the Turkish £1 they received only thirteen francs. But it is

significant that they preferred to lose over fifty per cent. of their

capital, and have the moiety secure in Switzerland to leaving it in

Constantinople.[1] It is certain therefore that at both ends of the

scale a distrust of German management has begun. A starving population

has wrecked trains loaded with food-stuffs going to Germany, and at the

other end the men with the swords of honour and dishonour deem it wise

to put their money out of reach of the great Prussian cat. That the

Germans themselves are not quite at their ease concerning the security

of their hold may also be conjectured, for they are, as far as possible,

removing Turkish troops from Constantinople, and replacing them with

their own regiments. An instance of this occurred in June 1917, when,

owing to the discontent in the capital, it was found necessary to guard

bridges, residences of Ministers, and Government offices. But instead of

recalling Turkish troops from Galicia to do this, they kept them there

in the manner of hostages, mixed up in German regiments, and sent picked

bodies of German troops to Constantinople. Fresh corps of secret police

have also been formed to suppress popular manifestations. They are

allowed to 'remove' suspects by any means they choose, quite in the old

style of bag and Bosporus, but the organisation of them is German. And

well may the German Government distrust those signs of popular

discontent in a starving population: already the people have awoke to

the fact that the German paper money does not represent its face-value,

and, despite assurances to the contrary, it is at a discount scarcely

credible. Three German £1 notes are held even in Constantinople to be

the equivalent of a gold £1, while in the provinces upwards of five are

asked for, and given, in exchange for one gold pound. It is in vain that

German manifestoes are put forth declaring that all Government offices

will take the notes as an equivalent for gold, for what the people want

is not a traffic with Government offices, but the cash to buy food. Even

more serious is the fact that Austrian and Hungarian directors of banks

will no longer accept these scraps of paper. In vain, too, is it that

the hungry folk see the walls of the 'House of Friendship' rise higher

and higher in Constantinople, for every day they see with starving eyes

the trains loaded with sugar from Konia, and the harvests raised in

Anatolia with German artificial manures guarded by German troops and

rolling westwards to Berlin. According to present estimates the harvest

this year is so vastly more abundant than that of previous years, that

no comparison, as the Minister of Agriculture tells his gratified

Government, is possible. But the poorer classes get no more than the

leavings of it when the armies, which include the German army, have had

their wants supplied. The governing classes, whom it is necessary to

feed, are not yet suffering, for the Germans grant them enough, issuing

rations to such families as are proved adherents of the German-Turkish

combination, and until the pinch of want attacks them we should be

foolishly optimistic if we thought that a starving peasantry would cause

the collapse or the defection of Germany's newest and most valuable

colony. There is enough discontent to make Germany uneasy, but that is

all.[2] Long ago she proved the efficiency of her control, and the

successful pulling of her puppet-strings, and no instance of that is

more complete than the brief story of Yakub Jemil and the extinction of

him and his party, which, though it happened a full year ago, has only

lately been completely transmitted. Yakub Jemil was an influential

commander of a frontier guard near the Black Sea coast. In July 1916 he

went to Constantinople, accompanied by his staff (which included the

informant from whom this account is derived), and, being cordially

received by Enver and Talaat, discussed the situation with them. He

pointed out the demoralising effect of the Armenian massacres, and the

danger of Jemal the Great's attitude towards the Arabs in Syria,

realising, and seeking to make them realise, the stupendous folly of

making enemies of the subject peoples, and urging the re-establishment

of cordial relations between the Turks and them. That, considering that

Enver and Talaat were responsible (under the Germans) for the Armenian

massacres, was a brave outspeaking. He went on to say that Turkey was at

war not on behalf of herself, but on behalf of Germany, and that it

would be wise of the Government to consider the possibility of a

separate peace with the Powers of the Entente. He was heard with

interest, and took his leave. He remained in Constantinople, and his

views obtained him many adherents, not only among Turkish officers whose

sympathies were already alienated from Germany, but among members of the

Committee of Union and Progress. But before long his adherents began to

disappear, and he asked for another interview with Talaat. He was

received, as the informant states, 'with open arms,' for Talaat seized

and held him, called for the guard, and he was searched, and on him were

found certain documents which proved him to hold the views he had

already expressed. That now, was enough. He was 'interrogated' for two

days (interrogation is otherwise called torture), and was then hanged.

Subsequently 111 officers and men in the army also disappeared. Some

were marched into the Khiat Khana Valley, opposite Pera, and were

stabbed: others were sent under escort to the provinces and murdered. No

courts-martial of any kind were held.

[Footnote 1: Similarly, in October of this year, a new Turkish law was

passed, prohibiting the acquisition of Turkish land by foreign settlers.

This is aimed point-blank at Germany, and has naturally annoyed Berlin

very much.]

[Footnote 2: The army rations have lately been reduced, each Turkish

soldier receiving daily an oke of bread and a dried mackerel.]

And should anybody doubt the efficiency of German control in Turkey, and

be disposed to be optimistic about the imminence of Turkey's detachment,

he might do well to ponder that story.

Meantime the efficacy of our naval blockade is largely discounted by

Germany's new source of supply. Possibly in the ensuing winter of

1917-18 conditions may get unbearable, but if the Turkish Government

only two years ago massacred more than a million of its subjects, it

would be absurd to expect that the starving of a million more would

produce much effect on the Ministers of the Turkish God of Love.[1] The

people are, of course, told, with suitable statistics, how famine is

decimating England and France, and how the total starvation of those

unfortunate countries is imminent. Indeed, of all the signs of want of

confidence in their German overlords, by far the most promising are the

facts that Talaat and Enver have sent their money out of the country,

and that Jemal the Great has a swelled head. On these facts there is a

certain justifiable optimism to be based. It will do no good to consider

them academically in London; but are there not practical channels to

reach the instincts of the Turkish triumvirate that might be navigated?

[Footnote 1: The following list of prices in Constantinople is of

interest:--

July 1914. July 1917.

Rice, per lb. 2-1/4 d. 3s. 4d.

Milk, per quart 5d. 2s.

Flour, per lb. 3d. 2s. 6d.

Petroleum, per lb. 1d. 4s. 6d.

Pair of boots £1 £8. ]

We need not trouble ourselves with considering what the Allies will

have to do with the Turkish army when once the end of the war comes, for

the collapse of the military party in Turkey, which owes its whole

vitality to Germany, will be perfect and complete. But the economical

future of Turkey is not so plain: at the present moment its bankruptcy

is total. Early in the war Germany drained it of such bullion as it had,

and has since then advanced it about £150,000,000, which, as far as I

can trace, is entirely in German paper, and must be redeemed in gold at

some period (chiefly two years) after the end of the war. That is

wonderful finance, and one marvels that Turkey could have been so far

blinded as to accept it. But I expect that the swallowing of the first

loan was sweetened by a spoonful of jam of this kind. Germany pointed

out that, though England was quite certainly going to lose the war, she

had issued an immense paper coinage which had all the purchasing power

of gold. Germany, on the other hand, with her dear Ally to help her, was

just as certainly going to win the war. How, then, could there be the

slightest risk of the German paper money depreciating a single piastre

in value? That sounded very good sense to Turkey, who was equally

convinced that she would be on the victorious side (else she would not

have joined it), and down went the loan with a pleasant sensation of

sweetness. A second loan was easily induced by the failure of the

Dardanelles expedition, and about then the 'ignorant' Turkish peasant

began to wonder whether the paper was quite as valuable as gold, and to

prefer gold or even the ordinary silver piastre to its German

equivalent. To counteract that, as we have seen, a law was passed making

it criminal to hoard gold, and, to complete the ruin, the silver piastre

was called in, and a nickel token was substituted.... We can but bow our

heads in reverence of the thoroughness of German swindling.

Now Turkey is completely bankrupt, and we must ask ourselves why Germany

ever bargained for the repayment in gold, after the war, of the millions

she had lent the Turks in paper, if she knew that Turkey could never

repay her. True, the loans had only cost her the paper the notes were

printed on, so that in no case could she prove a loser, but how could

she be a gainer? The answer to that question shouts at us from every

acre of Turkish soil. The immense undeveloped riches of Turkey supply

the answer. Some indeed are already being developed, and the labour and

most of the materials have been paid for by the German paper notes.

There are the irrigation works at Adana, there is the beet-sugar

industry at Konia, the irrigation works in the Makischelin Valley, the

mineral concessions of the Bagdad Railway, the Haidar Pasha Harbour

concessions, the afforestation scheme near Constantinople, the cotton

industry in Anatolia--there is no end to them. Turkey may not be able to

pay in cash, but over all these concessions already working, and over a

hundred more, of which the concessions have been granted, Germany has a

complete hold, and her victim will pay in minerals and cotton and sugar

and corn. She will pay over and over and over again, as none who have

the smallest knowledge of Kultur-finance can possibly doubt. She is

bled white already, and for the rest of time bloodless and white will

she remain. Only one event can possibly avert her fate, and that is the

victory of the Allies.

We have been so bold as to assume that this is not an impossible

contingency, and on that assumption there is a brighter future for

Turkey than the Prussian domination could ever bring her. Bankrupt she

is, but, as Germany saw, she is rich in possibilities even with regard

to the restricted territory to which she will surely find herself

limited, and it is a pleasant chance for her that Germany has already

been so busy in developing the resources of Anatolia. For Germany may

safely bet her last piece of paper money that she will not lay a finger

on them.

The Turkey of the future is to be for the Turks; not for the persecuted

Armenians, nor for the Arabs, nor for the Greeks, and assuredly it is

not to be for the Prussians. While the war lasts, Germany may draw

supplies from the fields her artificial manures have enriched, and from

the acres that her paper money has planted, but after that no more. Her

Ottomanising work will be over. Such development (and it is far from

negligible) as she has done in Syria will be continued under French

protection for the Arabs, such as she has done in Mesopotamia under

English protection, and such as she has done in Anatolia will be

continued by the Turks to drag them out of the utter insolvency that she

has brought them to. Never before has a country so justly and so richly

deserved the repudiation of a debt incurred by the confidence trick. Not

a civilised Government in the world would dream of enforcing payment,

any more than a magistrate would enforce a payment to some

thimble-rigger returning from a race-meeting.

The roar of battle still renders inaudible all voices save its own, but

already the dusk begins to gather over the halls where sit the War-lord

and those who, for the realisation of their monstrous dreams, loosed

hell upon the world, and in the growing dusk there begin to steal upon

the wall the letters of pale flame that to them portend the doom, and to

us give promise of dawn. Faintly they can see the legend _Mene, Mene,

Tekel, Upharsin...._

THE END