Chapter XXI: The Rebirth of Turkey 229 (7)

We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr. Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in 1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek _fait accompli_ across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907 Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both Turkey and Russia.

The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war, both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions, one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea, at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”

By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he continued to Constantinople.

Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in _Sunni Islam_ which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still awaits, _inter alia_, the fate of Mosul.

The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923, leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July 17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of negotiation.

On August 4, terms for the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Turkey were signed at Lausanne. Relations had been severed on April 20, 1917, by the Enver Government at Constantinople and on May 5, 1923, Ismet Pasha had written Joseph C. Grew, American Minister to Switzerland, proposing negotiations looking toward the resumption of regular relations. Two Turco-American Treaties resulted, one a general treaty and the other an extradition treaty, the former recording American acquiescence in the abrogation of the Capitulations which Ismet Pasha had imposed upon the Allies. Under this treaty, Americans and American institutions in Turkey are hereafter to be subject to Turkish law and Turkish taxes, Turkey having voluntarily agreed during negotiations with the Allies to appoint four legal advisers, nationals of countries neutral in the late war, who are to serve for a term of five years and whose function is to be rigorously restricted to the offering of advice. By this abrogation of the Capitulations, Turkey enters into a status of equality in the family of nations. In July, 1894, Buddhist Japan began a five-year probationary period preparatory to its acquisition of that status of equality which previously been the exclusive right of the Christian nations, but in July, 1923, its Treaty of Peace with the Allies conferred upon Moslem Turkey a status of immediate equality with the Christian nations and Japan.

Ratification of the two Turco-American Treaties is to be exchanged at Constantinople “as soon as possible” and the Treaties are to take effect two months after ratification, the intervening period being allowed for the evacuation of the American naval forces from Turkish waters.

Meanwhile, Greco-Turkish agreements signed at Lausanne on Jan. 30, 1923, had preceded Greek participation in the Allied Peace Treaty of July 24. On January 30, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their Moslem and Orthodox nationals, respectively, amounting to a total of possibly 500,000 persons, exception being made for Moslems of Western Thrace and Orthodox of Constantinople, Turkey permitting the Oecumenical Patriarchate to remain at the Phanar in Stamboul subject to its disestablishment and to the departure of Meletios IV, the then Patriarch. With this precedent agreement, Greece recognized in the Peace Treaty of July 24 “her obligation to make reparation for the damage caused in Anatolia by the acts of the Greek Army or administration which were contrary to the laws of war. On the other hand, Turkey, in consideration of the financial situation of Greece resulting from the prolongation of the war and from its consequences, finally renounces all claims for reparation against the Greek Government.” In lieu of reparation, Turkey accepted the suburb of Karagatch across the Maritza from Adrianople, which was surrendered by the Greek Army on September 15 in as wrecked a condition as the towns from which the Greek Army had fled in Anatolia a year before.

On August 23 the Grand National Assembly at Angora ratified the Peace Treaty of Lausanne by a vote of 215 to 20, and on the following day the Allied evacuation of Constantinople and the Straits began, to be completed within a period of six weeks….

To realize the meaning of the Treaty of Lausanne, we shall have to go back some distance into Ottoman history. Sultan Selim III who was deposed in 1808, was possibly the first of the Ottoman reformers. Mahmoud II who succeeded him, was another great Sultan who saw the need of introducing Western methods into his Eastern realm, and it was he who abolished the Janissaries in 1826 as a result of their long opposition to reform. Abdul Medjid I was a third great reformer who proclaimed the Tanzimat in 1839 under whose terms all Ottoman subjects were to be given an equal status in temporal law. The Tanzimat dealt with sweeping reforms in education, in methods of tax collection and in the courts, but Czarist Russia put a stop to Ottoman reform in the aggression of 1853 which resulted in the Crimean War.

Under Abdul Aziz, a Western-trained group of Turks revived Ottoman reform and when Abdul Hamid II became Sultan, Midhat Pasha succeeded in proclaiming a Constitution. Again Czarist Russia put a stop to reform in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 and the Berlin Congress adopted the title of “the Sick man of Europe” which the Czar had invented for the Sultan. Czarist Russia and Western Europe now took over the problem of Ottoman reform themselves, directing it to the benefit of the Sultan’s Bulgarian and Armenian subjects while passing over the equally urgent needs of his Turkish subjects. Ottoman reform as thus directed now became the fixed objective of Christendom from Czarist Russia to the country towns of the United States, while Islam in time from the Balkans to the back hills of Java became increasingly anxious over “our brother Turk.”

Alarmed by the dividing effect of Ottoman reform in Western hands, the Western-trained Young Turks again revived their own program of reform and when Sir Edward Grey agreed with Czarist Russia in 1907 on the eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks hurriedly revived Midhat Pasha’s Constitution in the Revolution of 1908. But the end was already at hand. Austria-Hungary immediately annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence. Insurrections began in Albania in which Austria-Hungary was not disinterested and in Kurdistan in which Czarist Russia was not disinterested. The Italians landed in Tripoli and the First Balkan War brought the Bulgarians to the Chatalja lines behind Constantinople, putting an end not only to any attempt at Young Turkish reform but almost to the existence of the Empire. In the Western view, this sort of thing constituted Ottoman reform, and in 1914 the Anglo-Russian combination closed on the Empire and reformed it out of existence. The Sevres Treaty in 1920 finally wrote the last chapter in the story of Western reform by proposing to hand over the richest provinces of the Turkish country to Greeks and Armenians while denying the Turks any right whatever to an independent existence. The Sevres Treaty was and still is a full and complete definition of the word “reform” when applied by Allied diplomacy to Turkish lands.

In the meantime, the Young Turks abrogated the Capitulations in 1914 and with their hands untied for the first time in their modern history, a number of other reforms followed in rapid succession despite the fact that they were engaged in a world war. When Rauf Bey met Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros to apply for an armistice in 1918, he stipulated that the abrogation of the Capitulations would have to be recognized, but the first act of the Allies upon occupying Constantinople was to re-impose the Capitulations and to undo every reform which the Young Turks had succeeded in making. Within a few months, the Greek occupation of Smyrna threw the Young Turks into the heart of Anatolia. Turkish nationalism repeated and amplified Rauf Bey’s stipulations at Mudros in the Erzerum program of 1919. The Ottoman Parliament committed itself to the Erzerum program early in 1920 under the name of the National Pact. British officers reformed the Ottoman Parliament out of existence on the night of March 15-16, 1920, but away in the heart of Anatolia Turkish nationalism possessed as free a hand for its own program of reform as its state of siege permitted. What the Sevres Treaty was to Western reform in Turkey, the Grand National Assembly became to Turkish reform in Turkey; and when Soviet Russia recognized the National Pact in 1921, the fingers which had long strangled Ottoman reform were removed, temporarily at least, from the Turkish throat.

Afghanistan quickly recognized the Pact. The three Soviet Republics of Trans-Caucasia recognized it. Insofar as it concerned Cilicia, France recognized it. Soviet Ukrainia recognized it early in 1922. Insofar as it concerned Eastern Thrace, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary recognized it at the point of the bayonet in the Mudania armistice. But at Lausanne, Ismet Pasha placed the rest of the Pact before Lord Curzon and early in 1923 Lord Curzon, having swallowed a few drops of the nasty stuff, returned to London. There seemed then to be as little chance of Ismet Pasha’s diplomatic success as there had once seemed to be of Fevzi Pasha’s military success, but Turkish reform would not be alive today if it had not learned long ago to achieve the impossible. Little by little, Ismet Pasha dropped away the non-essentials of the Pact while holding fast to the abrogation of the Capitulations which the Enver Government had decreed on Sept. 28, 1914, and on July 24, 1923, the British Foreign Office finally accorded its recognition to the essentials of the National Pact, exception being made for further negotiation over Mosul.

For the last century, the Ottoman Empire has sought justice at the hands of Czarist Russia and the West. Czarist Russia has finally ceased to exist and Turkey has finally gained justice from the West at the point of the bayonet, a fact which we Christians of the West might do well to ponder. It secured from the West at Lausanne a belated recognition of its right to control its own reforms in its own country and since Czarist Russia and the West by their long endeavor to impose reforms from without for the exclusive benefit of the Turk’s minorities, have made it impossible for the Turk and his minorities to live together, the Turk today has only himself to consider in Turkey. Insofar as no further Western attempts are made to strangle Turkish reform (and if the past is any clew to the future, such attempts are quite certain to be made), the future of Turkey now depends on the Turk. We know at last who is responsible in Turkey, and this is a very substantial gain.

XX

THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM

ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW TURKISH STATE――MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA OPENS THE SMYRNA CONGRESS――THE CHESTER CONCESSION A STEP FROM IMPERIALISM TO LAW.

As soon as the Erzerum program had been definitely committed to negotiation at Lausanne, Mustapha Kemal Pasha lost no time in diverting into the ways of peace the energy with which Turkish nationalism had re-mobilized and re-equipped its Armies. For the building up of a new and Western economic tradition with which to supplement the old and Eastern military tradition which had long distinguished its nation, the new Turkish Government had laid its foundations well. It had refrained from the issue of paper money, confining itself to the use of paper issued by the old Ottoman Government during the war. As fast as this paper became worn out, it was sent to the headquarters of the Public Debt administration in Constantinople to be exchanged for clean paper. Unlike a number of post-war European Governments, it had refrained from financing itself by the use of the printing press but the merit of this achievement is of course lessened by the primitive nature of the country which it governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the Assembly were paid out of the _Evkaf_ (Moslem religious endowments) in their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25 gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.

Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with great devastated areas in the “Pontus,” in Cilicia, in the eastern provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic structure which the Turk would prove himself able to build upon it.

The abrogation of the Capitulations on Sept. 28, 1914, had turned the customs traiff over to the Government and when Angora inherited the burden of debt and undevelopment which had borne Constantinople down, the customs tariff was increased from five to fifteen times over the old Capitulatory tariff. This was done primarily for protective purposes. Insofar as the war permitted, the development of home industries was to be given every possible stimulus. Even down to such minor industries as the manufacture of men’s headwear, nationalist solicitude for home industries was quickly shown. Presumably one reason why the lamb-skin _kalpak_ has been substituted in the new Turkey for the old Ottoman _fez_, is the fact that _fezzes_ were manufactured in Austria. Although it deprived the Government of a revenue which was said to amount to £T4,000,000 a year at a time when it needed every _piaster_ it could lay its hands on, country-wide prohibition was voted soon after the Grand National Assembly was convened at Angora.

Since Asia Minor is in large part an agricultural area, the Government’s first economic plans were directed toward the development of agriculture, and a scheme was evolved under which farm machinery was to be purchased abroad by a Government company and distributed through the branches of the Government’s Agricultural Bank. This scheme may or may not materialize as the Government enters more fully into foreign commercial relationships, but its spirit is highly significant. Trade has passed definitely into the hands of the Turks and in the building up of an economic tradition to which the Turks have heretofore been strangers, Turkish nationalism confronts its real problem.

On Feb. 17, 1923, Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the country’s first economic congress at Smyrna. More than 500 delegates were present. Farmers and producers were given the center block of seats, traders and business men the right block, and skilled workmen the left block, with a special section of the hall given over to an exhibition of agricultural machinery, most of it from the United States. It was a unique event in Turkish history, and its significance may be gathered from Kemal Pasha’s opening address, which merits quotation in part:

“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political, military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the Turkish people, one will see that her grandeur and her decadence are merely corollaries of her economic life. So in order to raise the new Turkey to the desired level, it is necessary, cost what it may, to accord all our solicitude to the questions which concern her economics.

“In the course of Ottoman history, all the efforts employed, all the activities of her statesmen, have had as their aim, not to satisfy the desires of the people nor to realize their aspirations, but rather to appease petty yearnings and personal ambitions. Comrades, if one examines closely the reigns of Mohammed II, of Selim and of Suleiman, one finds that these great and powerful monarchs based their foreign policy on their desires to satiate their personal leanings and ambitions. They had thus to regulate their internal organization in accordance with their foreign policy. Now foreign policy ought to be, on the contrary, subordinated to the internal organization――that is to say, foreign policy should be dominated by the internal economic situation.”

Kemal Pasha went on to explain that the monarchical policy of subordinating internal organization to foreign policy, had led to the necessity of allowing conquered elements to retain their national organizations in which they devoted themselves peacefully to economic pursuits while the “essential element” protected them, wielding the sword against their enemies on every frontier of the Empire. “Gentlemen, those who effect conquests by the sword finish by being beaten by those who employ as their arm the plow, and by ceding their place to them. In the struggle between the sword and the plow, it is always the plow which comes out on top.”

As soon as Rauf Bey returned from Malta, he was given the Ministry of Public Works at Angora, where the elaboration of a scheme of railway development was given immediate attention. Negotiations ensued with the representatives of the Ottoman-American Development Company, backed by Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N. (retired), who had been in previous negotiation with the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople. On April 11, 1923, the development scheme which the Government had formulated, was made over to the Ottoman-American Company by the Grand National Assembly and on April 30, the Minister of Public Works signed a convention with two representatives of the Company for what has long been famous as the Chester Concession.

This Turkish program falls into three parts――the construction of 2,714 miles of new railway line, the construction of a new capital city at Angora and of ports at Samsun, Yamurtalik and Trebizond together with the re-construction of towns and villages wrecked by the Greeks, and the exploitation of mineral rights within twenty-_kilometer_ zones on each side of the new railway lines. The convention with the Chester group runs for a term of ninety-nine years unless the Turkish Government chooses to exercise its right of purchase after thirty years. The Turkish company which is to operate the new railway lines is to pay thirty percent of its profits to the Government and is to be subject to all Turkish taxation except customs duties on its construction materials and its coal, the latter of which is to be exempt for a period of ten years only. The company may employ foreign experts (the original Chester project of 1909 stipulated that they were to wear the _fez_ and a Government uniform), but Turks are to be trained to take their places and the labor gangs are to be purely Turkish. There is no _kilometric_ guarantee, nor does the Concession add any financial burden to the burdens which the Turkish Government already bears, until such time as the Government may decide to take over the lines.

The backbone of this Turkish program is its railway scheme, and in this respect it differs widely from the original Chester project of 1909. Czarist Russia having disappeared, the Turkish Government now revives the central Anatolian scheme which was first suggested for the Bagdad Railway and vetoed by Russia. It proposes to extend the Eski-Shehr-Angora line which was orginally intended for the main line of the Bagdad Railway, to Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr and Mosul, but it adapts its railway program to the needs which have developed during the last four years. It may be assumed that military considerations have played a part in the framing of the Government’s railway scheme, for the war in Europe is not yet ended, and nobody knows how long a breathing space Turkey is to be permitted.

The first line to be built is to be the Yamurtalik-Kharput-Bitlis line, with a branch dropping to Mosul, Kirkuk and Suleimanieh. If and when this line is completed, it will strengthen the Syrian and Mesopotamian frontiers, and its western end, terminating in an excellent harbor at Yamurtalik on the Turkish side of Alexandretta Bay, will afford the Government a port which it sorely needs on the Mediterranean.

The second line to be built is to be the Angora-Erzerum line with branches dropping to Samsun and Trebizond on the Black Sea. At present the Government has no access by rail to any of its Black Sea ports. Possibly if it had had speedy access to the “Pontus” provinces, they would not have been devastated by irregular warfare during these last four years.

The final lines to be built are embodied in a group by which the Angora-Sivas line is to be connected _via_ Caesarea with Ulu Kishla on the Bagdad Railway, and the Erzerum line is to be extended to Bayazid on the Persian frontier. The Erzerum and Bayazid lines in the eastern provinces are of obvious bearing on any future Russian attempt to repeat the great invasion of 1915-’16. They are of more meaning than that. At present Soviet Russia and Turkey are at peace with each other, and if and when the railway program which the Turkish Government has made over to the Chester group is completed, Russia may be afforded an overland outlet to the Mediterranean at Yamurtalik. The Russian and Turkish gauges differ, the former being 5 feet and the latter 4 feet 8½ inches, but the political possibilities in affording Soviet Russia peacefully what Czarist Russia sought by force, are incalculable. Peaceful access to the Mediterranean over the Chester lines might easily reduce the Straits to a very small factor in Russia’s foreign policy. While Turkey is not a Socialist State and presumably will not be, Russo-Turkish peace is the very foundation of any world peace and if the Chester group is able to contribute effectively to an enduring Russo-Turkish peace, it will perform a service of incalculable worth to the cause of world peace.

A month after the grant of the Chester Concession, Allied concessionaires began filtering into Angora from Constantinople, to begin economic negotiations with the Turkish Government simultaneously with the political negotiations which were dragging toward an end at Lausanne. These economic negotiations comprised four subjects: (1) the status of pre-war concessions; (2) the status of modifications authorized by the Ottoman Government after the Mudros armistice; (3) compensation for war damage to the property of concessionaires; and (4) the extension of concessions for a period equal to that in which they had been non-operative during the war. By the middle of June, the Constantinople Telephone Company (British) had reached agreement with the Turkish Government. Early in July, similar agreements had been reached by the Smyrna-Aidin Railway (British) and the Mudania-Brussa Railway (French).

Meanwhile, the Assembly adjourned for new elections. Peace not yet having been signed at Lausanne, the Nationalist Party went to the country on the basis of the National Pact and was returned by an overwhelming majority. It was a war election, somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Lloyd George’s “khaki election” of 1918, and party government with a strong Opposition in the Assembly is hardly to be expected at Angora until after an assured peace has come to Turkey.

The Second Assembly was convened in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora on August 11 and Mustapha Kemal Pasha was re-elected President by 196 of the 197 deputies who had reached the capital. Presumably the lone dissenting vote was the vote of “the Pasha” himself. Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior, was elected Prime Minister in place of Rauf Bey and most of the remaining Ministers were re-elected, Ismet Pasha retaining the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and Fevzi Pasha remaining Chief of the General Staff. The Treaty of Lausanne having been ratified on August 23, the Assembly lost no time in approaching the urgent problem of its own economy and on September 5 Fethy Bey announced the main lines of the Government’s policy. He stressed first the problem of finance and the necessity of readjusting taxation. Further points on which the Government proposed to concentrate, he said, were the schools system and the _gendarmerie_. His speech was noteworthy for the brevity of its references to foreign affairs. Given peace abroad, the Government’s program as enunciated by Fethy Bey is an internal program.

XXI

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

With the rebirth of Turkey, this narrative approaches its end. With the coming of a probable peace, the passions which have been raised in the Near and Middle East need sorely to be allayed, and there would be small usefulness in this narrative of the destruction they have worked, if the past did not contain its element of useful guidance for the future.

We in the West are heavily in debt to England. It is England which has slowly and laboriously fashioned our Western tradition of democratic government and that tradition has placed us all incalculably in England’s debt. That tradition is still evolving and England is still, as it has always been, the scene of its evolution. But in acknowledging our debt to England, we need to think clearly, to distinguish sharply between the British democracy and the British Foreign Office. Between the two, there is no effective connection. The Foreign Office is outside the British Constitution and is not subject to the effective control of the British Parliament. British foreign policy in the Near and Middle East neither originates in Parliament nor is controlled by Parliament. This is a state of things which has been at once a source of enormous strength to British diplomacy and a source of enormous danger to world peace.

It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey’s Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the 1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office’s actual war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events played straight into the Foreign Office’s hand. The brigade off Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the Czarist archives at Petrograd.

Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history, deprived even of the tame Kerensky _regime_, the British Foreign Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen, with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.

The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does not lightly change its aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople, he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new _regime_ for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes, in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign Office may be not distant.

We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament, they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally attained a degree of nationhood “one and indivisible” which is far beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain. Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported from the land in which they had lived for four peaceful centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Caliph, and for this truly colossal achievement the thanks of a grateful Christendom are due to Mr. Lloyd George, who attempted to impose alone upon Islam that fate which Sir Edward Grey had agreed in 1907 to impose in conjunction with Czarist Russia.

The disestablished Oecumenical Patriarchate still remains in Constantinople and the departure of Meletios IV on July 10, 1923, may open its doors to the new Turkish Orthodox Church of Anatolia. The day seems to be at hand when the remnant of the Turkish Christians, welded firmly into the Turkish State by the flame of nationalism, may restore the Patriarchate to those exclusively religious functions which in the Western view are the only proper functions of a Church.

Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern _regime_ of law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the footlights, framed in the little proscenium of the theatre, stood the plump figure of the poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, now an old man of seventy-two, his voice hoarsened to a whisper, the perspiration streaming from beneath his _kalpak_, as he intoned his verse in liquid Turkish. Once a lonely cry in the wilderness, his voice that night was punctuated with quick applause. For twenty years he has been lifting up his cry and today he is still making his way through the scorched and decimated villages of Turkey, still burning himself out with his old cry:

“_I am a Turk_;

“_My race and language are great_.”

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

The one footnote was moved to the end of the chapter in which its related anchor occurs.

Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings, and misspelled words were left unchanged.

Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Duplicate partial words at line endings were removed.

The text of one sentence, in which one or more lines of text were misplaced, was not changed:

However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly
it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative
interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could
Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its
Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab
nationalism.

Two instances of wrong usage of words were not changed:

“are” should be “the” ―― “We in are West who are accustomed …”
“no” should be “not” ―― “… was no in contact …”