Chapter XXI: The Rebirth of Turkey 229 (2)

“And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nought: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he that humbleth himself shall be exalted…”

The missionaries remained Americans as well as Protestants. They administered Westernism as well as Protestantism to the Armenians, and the result of the administration of Westernism was bloodshed. The example of Nihilism in Russia lured the Armenians on into the secret society craze. Armenian revolutionary societies answered bloodshed with more bloodshed, and the tragedy began whose ghastly fruition we have seen.

Some of the missionaries recoiled from further missionary effort and opened schools and hospitals instead which they threw open impartially to all the races of the Empire. These schools were instituted solely for educational purposes and the largest of them offered as good a schooling as most American colleges in the United States offered. Their effort was to offer the best that Americans at home had and even in such incidentals as the architecture of their buildings, they made themselves as completely American as possible. Two of the largest of them were built high on the wooded shores of the Bosphorus and nobody can glance at them today without knowing at once that they are American. High above the suburbs of the old capital, they look as if they had been transported bodily from Chicago.

One can share our pride in our own devices and our own customs, one can sympathize in our desire to see other countries adapt themselves to American methods, but it was not the effort of these schools to strike a balance between American and Ottoman cultures. What these schools offered was out-and-out Americanism and their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople, American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word “imperialism” means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet, “Imperialism has never bothered _us_….”

While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the _Shiah_ Moslems of Persia under the suzerainty of the _Sunni_ Caliph and this scheme involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in 1902. But Abdul Hamid had his own imperialism to consider, made necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate, and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply into Central Asia.

Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_ in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the greatest Moslem Power in the world.

But King Edward’s first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem opinion both in the Ottoman Empire and in India. The Emperor of India was growing impatient. His further visits in 1905 and 1907 resulted in a program of reforms in _gendarmerie_, finances, judiciary, public works and the Army, which were to be imposed from without upon the rigidly conservative Empire. To the Young Turks who had been working feverishly ever since the first visit to Austria in 1903, preparing to attempt the imposition of their really fundamental reforms from within, his program was only a step toward the final break-up of the Empire. Already, instead of securely bridging the gap between East and West the Empire creaked and cracked as though presently it would tumble into the widening chasm.

Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of 1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide and empty.

[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in
Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918
by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the
predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their
(the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says
Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from
1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in
any _vilayet_.”

IV

THE RUSSIAN MENACE

HOW RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOUGHT ACROSS THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE――HOW RUSSIA ENTERED TRANS-CAUCASIA AND CAME INTO CONTACT WITH THE ARMENIANS――HOW IT APPROACHED THE BACK OF BRITISH INDIA THROUGH CENTRAL ASIA――HOW GREAT BRITAIN FINALLY SURRENDERED IN THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907.

Old Russia was a great Eastern absolutism which had looked upon the modern West and faithfully copied the methods of its imperialism. These it utilized in its search for a secure outlet to the sea. It had reached the sea at Archangel on the Arctic, but Archangel is blocked by ice for nine months of the year. It had reached the sea along the Baltic shores, but its Baltic ports were as landlocked as the Lake ports in the United States. The Baltic was commanded by Germany and Germany in turn was commanded by Great Britain. It had touched salt water along the Black Sea, but its Black Sea ports were commanded by the Ottoman Empire astride the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

It was unable to rectify its position in the Baltic without precipitating a European war and European wars are not only expensive but to Eastern Powers like Russia are sometimes disastrous. It spent the better part of a century in trying to solve its Black Sea problem by hewing back the Ottoman Empire and attempting to fasten its control over the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople. But the Straits had already become the most vulnerable spot in the armor of the British Indian sea lines and the Ottoman Sultan was accordingly backed by all the influence which the great British Embassy in Constantinople could exert.

Thus when Russia compelled the Sultan to pay its price for stopping Mohammed Ali’s drive up the Syrian corridor from Egypt in 1832, Great Britain did not hesitate to quash Russia’s treaty with the Sultan. And when the issues which the quashing of that treaty had left unsettled, were revived twenty years later, Great Britain did not hesitate to enter the Crimean War to hold Russia back from any further approach to the Straits. And when twenty years still later, the Mother Slav State, following the lead of the South Slavs of Serbia, declared war on the Sultan and smashed its way into San Stefano in the very suburbs of Constantinople, the British Navy did not hesitate to steam boldly up the Straits and anchor off the Ottoman capital. For if the Russian Army had been permitted to occupy it, the British sea lines from India might easily have been thrown back to the long Cape route and another Trafalgar necessitated in order to settle again the question of the command of the Mediterranean, a question which the British Navy did not propose to re-open.

So we reach that titanic struggle between two outside imperialisms which kept the Ottoman Empire tied hand and foot but still alive. Against Russia, Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together. It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.

Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run. Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem, but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were most of the Armenians.

Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom, snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around Baku and found itself in contact with the Armenian _Catholicos_ and the eastern fringes of the _Ermeni_ community in the Ottoman Empire. In further accord with its policy of undermining that Empire, it availed itself of the presence of the Armenians in the usual imperialist manner and, in its war of 1876 against the Sultan, it drove its way deeply into his eastern provinces, transferring the Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty as it went. Its objective was the great bay of Alexandretta on the Mediterranean which was to free it of its Black Sea jail, a scheme which Great Britain recognized by secretly taking over the “administration” of Cyprus from the Sultan. The treaty of San Stefano stopped the Russian advance hundreds of miles short of Alexandretta and in front of the new Ottoman frontier, Russia developed Kars into a great fortress as a base for its further advance toward Alexandretta when opportunity offered.

Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian economic _regime_. It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian Caspian port of Baku, around which lay one of the greatest oil-fields in the world. It developed the village of Batum into a fortified Russian port on the Black Sea and with its Trans-Caucasian railroads from Batum _via_ Tiflis to Baku, it made Batum the gate to the Caspian for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now made Batum the world’s gate to the Persian capital.

From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited events.

East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under Russian provincial governments as had the Trans-Caucasian bridge. In time, a line of railway was driven from St. Petersburg _via_ Moscow and Orenburg to Tashkent at the back of Afghanistan, whence it linked with the Trans-Caspian Railway from Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku on the Caspian. Direct communication was thus afforded from St. Petersburg and from the Trans-Caucasian country to Persia and Afghanistan. With a Russian resident ruling in the ancient Moslem capital of Bokhara, a spur had been dropped from the Trans-Caspian line at Bokhara City to Termez on the northern frontier of Afghanistan whence a caravan road threads its way up into the passes of the Hindu Kush and down again to Kabul and the Khyber Pass. From the Merv oasis, also on the Trans-Caspian line, another spur had been dropped to Kushklinsky Post on the Afghan frontier whence the traditional Herat-Kandahar-Kabul road leads to the Khyber Pass and the fat plains of India.

This long loop of line from St. Petersburg and the Caspian to the back of Afghanistan traversed territory securely held by Russian arms and the British had no contact with it, except the frontal contact of their railheads on the southern frontier of Afghanistan, _i. e._, within India itself. Except for diplomatic exchanges between London and St. Petersburg, the Government of India had no means of making itself felt at Bokhara City and the Merv oasis. Indeed, Russia had made even the Afghan capital of Kabul an intermittent nightmare in India. Long ago, Russian intrigue in the Afghan capital had compelled the East India Company in 1839 to dispatch an expeditionary force to occupy Kabul and unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in 1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul became Russia’s favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia’s north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British Empire.

Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian “scientific” missions and a strange “plague cordon” began mysteriously to break up the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.

In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized, Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the question. The Government of India’s only road to Teheran was the 800-mile highroad _via_ Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.

The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in Persia by Russia’s projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean. The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the Ottoman Caliph and the Emperor of India, but its conception was hopelessly tardy. It had been broken a century ago when the East India Company was fretting about France, and Russia was bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range to occupy the Trans-Caucasian bridge; for in any Constantinople-Kabul line, the Caucasus Range is a frontier as indispensable to the Government of India as the Hindu Kush itself.

Even at Constantinople, the accustomed rule of the British Embassy had been supplanted by the rising influence of the German Embassy. A formidable new German enemy was already moving in force along the roads to British India. Great Britian was losing ground both in Constantinople and in Persia, which had now become the most vulnerable spots in its very vulnerable Indian Empire. The Czar was on his way to become the ruler of the world, and the British Government surrendered. At the price of a heavy retreat in Persia, it purchased a truce with its Russian enemy and faced about to meet its new German enemy.

That truce with Russia was the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which enabled King Edward to meet the Czar at Reval in 1908 to conclude the Anglo-Russian _entente_ against Germany. Under the terms of this historic Treaty, Russia abandoned Afghanistan to the Government of India, and Persia was divided into three “zones of influence,” the northern half of the country to Russia, most of the arid southern half a neutral zone, and a small triangle in south-east Persia to the Government of India, a triangle which was drawn to include all of Persia’s open seaboard from Bunder Abbas to Baluchistan, including Chahbar, Gwatter Bay and any other potential ports which Russian surveyors might have staked out. This division of the country was accompanied by mutual Russian and British engagements “to respect the integrity and independence of Persia,” a clause which gives us quite the correct imperialist touch.

The purpose of the two signatories in drawing this historic Treaty was “to settle by mutual agreement different questions concerning the interests of their States on the Continent of Asia,” and this they did with conspicuous success. They began by breaking Persia. They continued by breaking the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate of Islam. They have finished by breaking Christendom.

Possibly in the new humility and the broader tolerance in which Christendom will one day emerge from its present collapse, we shall all be the better for it.

V

THE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION

“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”――THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND ITS DEFEAT――HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM――KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT FROM POLITICS――THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.

Three months after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908, the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July 23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in Turkish――“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica. Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find Moslem _hojas_ and Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting for the _Padishah_. The magic of that Western word “Constitution” blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.

Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.]

Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.]

But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russian _entente_, its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two communions in Constantinople.

The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with shouts of “_Sheriat!_” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies――two Turks, a Christian and a Jew――presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government. And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its headquarters at Salonica.

Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more tightly to their community institutions. The application of Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as unpalatable to the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities as to the dominant Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.

Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere _coup d’etat_. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military _attache_ where he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.

The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.

Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made their _Rûm_ community more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul.

An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact with _Russian_ Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the _Russian_ claim to the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.

The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.

There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry of _Evkaf_ supplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic _Sokols_ and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “_I am a Turk, my race and language are great._” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.

The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raider _Hamidieh_ during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.

Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.

The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople, with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition, the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the Liberal _Entente_ Party, but it had a poor time of it.

VI

GERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

BRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS―― RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE――THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF ALEPPO――GERMANY AND ISLAM――THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA――THE GREAT WAR.

I must make it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict it to its proper _locale_. Although there was no German tradition in Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions, Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic. The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it impossible for the Government itself to finance.

The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines. But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy. Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight facilities to India.

But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman Government transferred to a syndicate formed by the _Deutsche Bank_ of Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople, to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a concession to extend the line some 300 miles due east _via_ Eski-Shehr to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of the Suez Canal.

This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.

With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a 1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company now compared in its high political significance with the late East India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta. Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed, was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire, pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of Cyprus.

When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was easy.

Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of 1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system. It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic needs of native Governments.

However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development of the East, and this is precisely what it did _not_ receive. Germany backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.

As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.

The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a division which pivotted on Serbia.

Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911, Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia. By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north, the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.

VII

CHRISTENDOM AND THE WAR

The effect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy, but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.

Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas, Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.

The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the word _Christian_ is an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.

The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect of Islam.

I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.

VIII

THE WAR AND ISLAM

KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH EMBASSY TO FINANCE NEUTRALITY――ENVER ENTERS THE WAR AND PERSIA ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM――THE HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

Kemal left his post as military _attache_ at Sofia immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige in the Army comparable to the prestige in the Navy which Hussein Rauf Bey had won in the raider _Hamidie_. The probability that Russia would participate in the European war had afforded the Enver Ministry the opportunity it sought to achieve its Pan-Turanian project, to carry the Crescent and Star to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province of Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and of the Russian provinces in Central Asia. Fired by the same crude Westernism as had turned the eyes of the Old Greeks to the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople, the Enver Ministry had envisaged a Greater Ottoman Empire which, while maintaining the Caliphate out of deference to Old Turkish and Islamic opinion, would “liberate” 40,000,000 “Turks” then “groaning under the heel of the Russian oppressor” and would emerge from the war a Great Power extending from the Balkans to Bokhara. The Arabs to the south would be hammered into that respect for the Caliphate which they had once manifested, but the Turks’ real future lay away to the east. So the Enver Ministry concluded its secret agreement with Germany, the British Government seized the two Ottoman battleships which were building in British yards, and Germany was soon to run the Goeben and Breslau into the Straits to take their places.

To Kemal and Rauf, the latter of whom had brought his crew home from one of the two seized battleships in England, Enver’s Pan-Turanianism was a program which the Empire could not afford. Both of them were Westerners, but their Westernism was hard and practical and close to the ground. Within the limits imposed upon them by the Caliphate, which made the Empire the leader of Islam, they held that the Turk’s first duty was to his own country. Russia having entered the war in Europe, a defense of the eastern frontier would be necessary but the Empire’s internal condition made it essential that events in Europe should not be permitted to carry it further than a state of armed neutrality. In the country’s bankrupt condition, the Enver Ministry had secured the promise of German loans on condition that it participated in the war against Germany’s enemies, and Rauf went to the British Embassy immediately on his return to Constantinople, to say that payment by the British Government for the two battleships it had seized would strengthen the hands of the Opposition by enabling it to finance mobilization on the eastern frontier without resort to German money.