Part 2

In the settlement of Turkey, conspicuously, the Allies will be crowning a historic task, at which they themselves have laboured in former times. The _liberation of the subject peoples of Turkey_, and the _reorganisation upon the principle of nationalities_ of countries under the Sultan’s _murderous tyranny_, began a century ago with the national struggles for independence of the Serbs and Greeks—struggles which were part of the general struggle for freedom in Europe, and which gave inspiration to the people of other subject lands. England, France and Russia stepped in in 1827 to secure Greece the reward of her heroism when she was almost succumbing to her oppressor; Russia compelled Turkey to recognise Serbian autonomy in her treaty of peace with Turkey in 1831; Russia again, by taking up arms in 1877, freed Rumania and Serbia from Turkish suzerainty, liberated more of their oppressed brethren for Serbia and Greece, and restored Bulgaria to national existence. In the Balkan War of 1912-13, the Balkan nations carried on the work by their unaided strength, and expelled the Ottoman Empire from all the provinces over which it still tyrannised in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople and Thrace. In 1916, the Sherif of Mecca, at the opposite extremity of the Ottoman conqueror’s domain, liberated an Arab province and the Holy Arab City of which he is the legitimate head. It is for the Entente to liberate the Arabs of Syria and the Armenians, who cannot save themselves.

The Syrians and Armenians have not, as the Turks and Germans allege, been disloyal to Turkey in her hour of danger. The Arab and Armenian conscripts have fought dutifully for a cause not their own in the Balkan War and in the present more terrible conflict. Their leaders are too prudent and the people too peaceable, their stake is too great, their forces are too scattered, to allow them for a moment to contemplate rising in arms. But their loyal and straightforward conduct has not preserved them from the ferocity of their Turkish rulers; it has only exposed them to a cold-blooded scheme of extermination which the Young Turks are prosecuting at this moment with all their might. The redemption of these innocent peoples from the hell into which they have been cast, and where they will remain in agony so long as Ottoman and Prussian militarism holds out, is incumbent upon the Allies if they are to redeem their plighted word.

CONSTANTINOPLE.

This is what the Allies owe in the settlement of Turkey to the _principle of nationalities_. But they are further pledged to vindicate _the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development_, and this touches the status of Constantinople.

Constantinople, since the Turks conquered it from its last Christian Emperor in 1453, has been the political capital of the Ottoman Empire. But ever since it has been a city at all, it has also been the strategical and economic key to the Black Sea, conditioning the security and dominating the economic development of all peoples bordering on the Black Sea coasts. It is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. It is the Turk’s at present by right of conquest, but that right justifies his expulsion by war if it justifies his original intrusion, and on broader considerations of population, sentiments, traditions and monuments of the past, Constantinople is more truly the capital of all the Christian peoples of the East. But it is not the exclusive possession of any of its native inhabitants, whether their presence there dates from more ancient or from comparatively recent times. The most important quarter in Constantinople is Pera, across the Golden Horn, which is inhabited by a foreign mercantile community, as international in its composition as the mercantile community in the Chinese “Treaty Port” of Shanghai. The chief volume of the transit trade which gives Constantinople its rank as a port, passes through these foreign residents’ hands. But even they are not the parties most vitally concerned in the economic status of Constantinople and the Straits. If conditions do not suit them, they can transfer their business elsewhere. The parties to whom the destiny of Constantinople is a matter of life and death are Russia and Rumania, two countries bound for ever by their geographical position to conduct their maritime trade through the Black Sea and the Straits that give entrance to it, and therefore at the mercy economically of any third power that holds the control of the Straits in its hands.

THE RIGHT TO FULL SECURITY.

And this is not a theoretical question. It is a practical problem for the national economy of Russia every year, and introduces a factor of uncertainty into Russia’s national trading which is profoundly detrimental to her prosperity. As sovereign of the Straits, Turkey not only possesses the technical right of closing the Straits to shipping; she exercises it in an arbitrary fashion. Three times the Straits have been closed by Turkey within the last half-dozen years—during her war with Italy, during the war with the Balkan States, and after the outbreak of the European war at a date previous to the intervention of Turkey herself in the struggle. It is possibly arguable that the closing was necessary in each of these cases from a military point of view, to safeguard Turkey’s political ownership of these “territorial waters.” But if so, that is in itself the strongest argument for taking out of the hands of an independent, irresponsible government a highway of commerce the proper regulation of which is essential to the economic well-being of the Russian and Rumanian peoples. Even if Turkey were a friendly, steady-going State, the situation would hardly be tolerable; but actually, whether through fault or misfortune, she has been at war more often during the last century than any other State in the world, and her hostility has been directed principally against Russia, the country most vitally affected by the disturbance of the traffic through the Straits. The closing of the Straits in the last instance, when Russia was at war with Germany and was in urgent need of the importation of supplies, can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a hostile act—an anticipation of the open war which Turkey made on Russia within the next few weeks. To leave this economic weapon in Turkey’s hands at the peace settlement would be impossible. By closing the Straits in any given year at the precise moment when the Russian harvest was shipped and ready to sail, and when the Russian importers had made their annual foreign purchases on credit up to the full prospective value which the harvest would realise in the markets of the world, Turkey could threaten Russia with a financial crisis verging on national bankruptcy. _Full security and free economic development_ for Russia would have vanished beyond the horizon, and not only for Russia but for the whole world, for with such a trump card in their hands, Turkey and her German patrons could never resist the temptation of waging an economic “war after the war,” which might bring Russia to her knees and enable them to realise those ambitions against her which they have been unable to realise by force of arms.

NO ALTERNATIVE.

That is why the control of the Straits, as well as the dominion over subject peoples, must be taken from the Ottoman Turks in the _reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement_, which is the aim of the Allies. But neutrals, rightly anxious for a peace as speedy as may be compatible with the attainment of the essential objects at stake, may ask whether either or both of the objects essential to the settlement of the Turkish Empire are not attainable by less drastic measures than a redrawing of frontiers and a transference of territorial sovereignty. Cannot the liberation of the subject peoples be effected, without impairing Turkey’s territorial integrity, by some system of devolution or local autonomy, under external guarantee and supervision? Is not this a field where the chief belligerents on either side, with the addition of the United States, might work together in concert? The answer is that this was precisely the solution attempted during the 19th century, and that through the present war it has finally broken down. During the 19th century the Concert of Europe did actually bring Turkey under a certain tutelage. The Ottoman tariff was regulated by treaty; the customs and other branches of revenue were managed by an International Administration of the Ottoman Debt, representing Turkey’s bondholders. There were various experiments in local autonomy; Crete and the Lebanon enjoyed self-government under foreign guarantee; there was an attempt to cure the anarchy deliberately fomented by the Turkish government in Macedonia, by forcing the government to accept foreign gendarmerie-inspectors with definite spheres of supervision; there was a promise of reforms in the Armenian Vilayets, exacted from Turkey at the International Congress of Berlin, but never carried beyond the stage of paper schemes. It is unfortunately true that this joint European tutelage was illusory, that it failed to remove or even mitigate the _murderous tyranny_ that has always characterised Turkish government, and that the Young Turks have used the opportunity of the War to repudiate it altogether. The British people have not lightly or inconsiderately accepted this conclusion—as they have, by implication, accepted it in framing this joint Note in conjunction with their Allies. They advance these two aims with regard to the settlement of Turkey—_the liberation of the subject peoples_ and _the expulsion of Turkey from Europe_—in the absolute conviction that they are necessary and right. But this conviction is in itself a very bitter confession of failure. It marks the reversal of a policy pursued for a century past; for during the whole of the 19th century Great Britain was the chief advocate of the policy which aimed at the settlement of Turkey by the preservation of her territorial integrity subject to the active tutelage of the Concert of Europe. British diplomacy was constantly exerted on this behalf, and British belief in this policy was so sincere that half a century ago Great Britain embarked in pursuit of it on a bloody war with one of her present allies. If Great Britain is now a convinced adherent of the alternative and more drastic settlement, it is because the system of joint European control, after a century of experiment which perpetuated and aggravated the ancient tyranny, bloodshed and despair, has been made finally impossible by the present War.

THE TURCO-GERMAN COMPACT.

It was to end it that the Young Turks entered the war on Germany’s side; for foreign control automatically breaks down if one Great Power, and still more if a group of two Powers, stands out of the Concert, renounces responsibility for the policy of the Turkish government towards the subject peoples and the economic highways which it holds in its power, and supports that government effectively in repudiating all claim to intervention on the part of the other Powers concerned. But this was the bargain struck between Germany and the Young Turks when Turkey attacked the Allies, without provocation, in October, 1914. The Young Turks placed all their economic and military resources at Germany’s disposal. Turkish troops (including of course the due percentage of conscripts from the subject peoples), are fighting Germany’s battles on the Riga, Halicz and Dobrudja fronts. The vast undeveloped economic resources of the Empire are, in the event of victory, to be thrown open to German exploitation when peace returns. These are concessions which Turkey has always jealously refrained from making to any other Power; and the price Germany has paid for them is the guarantee of just one thing—that the Young Turks shall have a free hand to repudiate all external control and to carry through their policy of “Ottomanisation” to a finish.

A FREE HAND TO “OTTOMANISE.”

The Turks have not delayed in carrying out their side of the bargain, and they have been equally prompt in using the free hand assured them by Germany in return. First they repudiated the “Capitulations”—a system of treaties not particularly equitable in themselves, but still treaties to which Turkey was pledged—by which the civil liberties of foreign residents in Turkey were guaranteed against the imperfections of Turkish judicial procedure. Then they repudiated the tariff treaties, and substituted for them a new tariff (recently published) of their own. Next they abrogated the Reform Scheme for the Armenian Vilayets, which the Concert of Europe had finally induced them to ratify, and dismissed the two Inspectors-General, a Dutchman and a Norwegian, whom they had themselves commissioned to carry the scheme into effect. But these breaches of contract were minor offences compared to the Armenian Deportations, the horror of which has been indicated briefly above, and which they did not venture to carry out until the Dardanelles Expedition had failed. To complete the elimination of every non-Turkish element in the Empire, they are now trying to rid themselves of the American Missionaries.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE MISSIONARIES.

The attitude of the Young Turks towards the Missionaries shows that their “Nationalism” has made them not only criminal but insane. The American Missionaries have worked in Turkey for more than eighty years. Their aim has been to revive religion in the subject Christian peoples and to give them an enlightened modern education; they have pursued this aim disinterestedly with a striking measure of success, and they have extended their work to the Moslems as far as the latter have responded to their advances. They are the creators of practically all the secondary education that exists in Turkey to-day. The most intelligent and progressive elements in the population of the Empire have come most under their influence, and have received from them a moral and intellectual stimulus which they could never have found for themselves. The educational work of the Missionaries should have been mentioned among the attempts made during the 19th century to reform Turkey gradually by a reconstruction within; for the effect of this work was far more penetrating, and far more fraught with hope for the future, than most of the political expedients instituted with diplomatic pomp and ceremony by the Concert of the Powers. And the Missionaries were the best friends of the Turkish government as well as of their subject peoples. They took no part in their pupils’ politics; they had no ulterior political purpose of their own to serve. They were the most valuable voluntary assistants the Young Turks could have had in what should have been their foremost aims if they had acted up to their democratic professions, and they were the assistants whom they had least of all to fear.

Actually, however, the Young Turks, after they had destroyed the Missionaries’ work by exterminating the subject peoples among whom it was principally carried on, dragging away to exile, shame and death the boys and girls in their schools, torturing to death the native professors whom the Missionaries had trained up to be their colleagues, have finally confiscated the American schools, colleges and mission-stations in many parts of the Empire, and have put the harshest pressure on the Missionaries themselves to quit the country of which they are the benefactors.

On April 4th, 1916, the Turkish newspaper _Hilal_ published an article in praise of a lecture by a member of the German Reichstag called Traub, in which the lecturer is reported to have declared himself “opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire.”

“The suppression,” writes _Hilal_, “of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical missions, a measure which follows the abolition of the capitulary régime, was no less important. Thanks to their schools, foreigners were able to exercise great influence over the young men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of the spiritual and intellectual guidance of our country. By closing them the Government has put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous....”

This is the policy of Ottomanisation. But it was put more bluntly by a Turkish gendarme in conversation with a Danish Red Cross Sister, who had been dismissed from her post in a hospital at Erzindjan for protesting against the Armenian Deportations. “‘First,’ he said, ‘we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds,’ He would certainly,” the Danish lady comments, “have been delighted to add: ‘And then the foreigners.’”[2]

THE TURCO-GERMAN ALLIANCE.

If they had not had the moral and military support of Germany, the Young Turks would never have been able to wage this final campaign of extermination upon every element of good in the countries and the peoples that are in their power. But it is not mere chance that the Turks and Germans have come together for these unholy ends.

In pursuing her ambition, Germany has found invaluable instruments in the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. These States would be anachronisms in a free democratic Europe, and were destined, if all went well with the world’s development, to be transformed into willing federations or else to dissolve into their constituent peoples. But neither federalisation nor dissolution suited the interest of the tyrannous minority which has so far dominated and exploited each of these Empires for its own selfish purposes. In the Hapsburg Empire the tyrants are the corrupt Magyar aristocracy, which dominates Hungary, and through Hungary the Empire as a whole. In the Ottoman Empire they are the Young Turks, a secret society with its central committee at Constantinople and branch committees in the provinces, and with a gang of sordid adventurers as their puppets in the nominal headship of what professes to be a democratic government.

The Young Turks and the Magyar Oligarchy saw that the guarantee of Prussia, and that alone, could preserve their tyranny against the progress of Democracy in Europe. The Prussians saw that the Turks and Magyars could sell them 70,000,000 human beings for “canonen futter,” in addition to the 70,000,000 Germans, Poles, Alsatians and Danes whom they already possessed. This extra 70,000,000 seemed to put world dominion within their reach. The bargain was struck, and the War was made under which the whole world is suffering, and must still suffer for a season, if liberty is to be saved and the evil of centuries to be brought to a tardy end.

There is no possibility of returning to the _Status Quo_ before August 1914—first, because the _Status Quo_ under the Turks was itself the mere perpetuation of an oppression and a misery that disgraced the civilised world, and that should have been ended long before; and secondly, because it has been made unspeakably worse during the War than it was before it. Every element of good that had maintained its existence under Turkish government, and that made less intolerable a system that in itself was too wicked to survive, is being stamped out now by deportation, spoliation, abduction and massacre. The evil has purged itself altogether of the good. Turkish tyranny has been stimulated by the German alliance into an unnatural vitality, and the Central Confederates dream of putting the clock in South-Eastern Europe a century back. Debauching one of the Balkan States by gorging her with spoil from the rest, they hope to stamp out liberty in the Balkans altogether, to reconquer for Militarism the field which the 19th century won here for Democracy, and to build over it a bridge by which three tyrant peoples, the Prussian, the Magyar and the Turk, shall join hands in dominating and destroying without interference a multitude of smaller and weaker peoples from Alsace to Rumania and from Schleswig to Baghdad.

It is not a question of ameliorating the _Status Quo_. The _Status Quo_ in Turkey, irremediable before, is being actively changed into something infinitely worse, and this is being accomplished, behind the bulwark of Militarism, under the eyes of the civilised world....

THE ANSWER OF THE ALLIES.

This is why the Allies’ aims are drastic, but it is also why they _find no difficulty in stating them in the full light of day_. Germany, who has not, like the Allies, met President Wilson’s request because she is ashamed of her aims and dare not face the reception they would have among all the free democratic peoples of the civilised world, will doubtless take what advantage she can of the Allies’ franker and more honourable rejoinder. In anticipation of such insidious manœuvres, the _Murderous Tyranny of the Turks_, both during the War and for centuries before it, has been set forth here for the judgment of the reader.

FOOTNOTES.

[1] The word “Turk” is here used as equivalent to “Turkish-speaking”; but of course only a fraction of the present Turkish-speaking population in the Ottoman Empire is Turkish by descent. The rest are older native elements, forcibly assimilated by the handful of Turkish conquerors from Central Asia.

[2] See British Official Publication: “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” (Misc. 31, 1916.)

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