Part 9

Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid, Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as to the quarter from which that financial assistance will be forthcoming, on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about 120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act of war.

The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen, England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany, in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right--she usually is right in these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical--for she seems dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as Dr. Rohrbach points out in his Bagdadbahn, needs only the guarantee of security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life. The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility, yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its sparse population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug canals, they made reservoirs, and harnessed like some noble horse of the gods the torrents that now gallop unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the canals still regulated the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.'

But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not diminished; the Turks could not dispose of that by massacre, as a means of weakening the strength of their subject peoples. It is still there, ready to respond to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphrates, which once, when handled and controlled, caused it to be the Garden of the Lord.

Not long before the present European War Sir William Willcocks, under whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at Assouan were constructed, was appointed adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his report on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was issued in 1911. He tells us that the whole of this delta of the Sawad is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. It would naturally be a gigantic scheme, and he takes as a basis to start on the question of the refertilisation of 4,000,000 acres. Into the details of it we need not go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thoroughly conservative basis, give the following results. He proposes to restore, of course with modern technical improvements, the old system of canals, and, allowing for interest on loans, estimates the total expense at £26,000,000 (or the cost of the war for about three days). On this the annual value of the crops would pay 31 per cent. The figures need no enlargement in detail and no comment.

But now comes the difficulty: the construction of the irrigation works is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and 'the ancient river,' the river Euphrates, run their course. But all the irrigation works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops. A million are necessary: where are they to come from? And the answer is 'Egypt and India.'

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose Bagdadbahn I have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution to the man-power problem except by the 'introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.' It is true that he starts upon the assumption that Mesopotamia will remain Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines), with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite correct. Even under German protection he realises that citizens of well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Their numbers are even more inadequate since the Armenian massacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach's Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad. He does not positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses it. His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but that, I feel sure, is his vision: 'he sees it, but not now; he beholds it, but not nigh.'

But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since for the English it is clearly more easily realisable. The native labour we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty. But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world. And I cannot do better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very noble words from Sir William Willcocks's report, in which he speaks of the desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked stewardship.

'The last voyage I made before coming to this country was up the Nile from Khartoum to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidding region I was filled with pride to think I belonged to a race whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands God has placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make can be too great to roll away the reproach of those parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven.'

But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gathered in, must needs be transported, and for that railways are necessary. Water transport would, of course, carry them easily down to the Persian Gulf, but the supply will be mainly, if not wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be conveyed to the shores of the Mediterranean. Already, in preparation for world-conquest, Germany has proceeded far with her construction of the Bagdad Railway, which was intended, after her absorption of Turkey, to link up Berlin with her next Oriental objective, namely, India; the Taurus has been tunnelled, the Euphrates bridged, and but for a hiatus of a few miles the line is practically complete from Constantinople into Northern Mesopotamia. But its route was chosen for German strategic reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Constantinople and Bagdad. This, it may be permitted to say, does not form part of the schemes of the Allies: it is to snap rather than weld such links that they have taken the field. What we want in the matter of railway transport for the harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our Eastern communications, is not a line that passes through Turkish and German soil, and terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the directest possible land-route, reaches the Mediterranean and terminates in suitable ports.

The reader therefore is requested to unthink the present Bagdad Railway altogether, to 'scrap' it in his mind, as it will be probably scrapped on the map, since it is utterly useless for our purposes. For taking Aleppo as (roughly) the half-way house in the existent line, we find that the western half of it lies in Asia Minor, in territory which, as we shall see, will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it makes a long detour instead of striking directly for Bagdad. After our experience with Turkey there is nothing less conceivable than that we should allow a single mile of our new Mesopotamia Railway to run through the territory of the Turks, for who knows that she might not (say when harvests are ripe and ready for delivery), on any arbitrary pretext, close or destroy the line, even as before now she has closed the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, a line that goes to Constantinople (in whosoever hands Constantinople may be after the war) is out of the way and altogether unsuitable. Eastwards, again, from Aleppo the present Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, admirably adapted to the German purposes for which it was constructed, but utterly unadapted to ours.

Let us then 'scrap' the existent Bagdad route altogether, and consider not what the Germans want, but what we want, which, as has been already stated, is a direct land communication with suitable Mediterranean ports. Of those there are three obvious ones, Alexandretta, Tripoli, and Beirut, of which Beirut is a long way the first in importance and potentiality of increased importance. Two possible routes therefore would seem to suggest themselves, one running from Alexandretta to Aleppo, and thence following pretty closely the course of the Euphrates till it reaches Hit, and from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina (the actual port of Tripoli), and also with Beirut by branch lines making a junction at Homs, and thus all those ports will be brought together on one system. But if the reader will glance at the map, he will see that by far the most direct communication with Bagdad would be to run the railway direct from there to Homs, thus making Homs rather than Aleppo the central junction of the system. From Homs lines would run northward to Aleppo, due west to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either of those routes, in any case, would be infinitely preferable to the long loop which the present Bagdad Railway traverses, as planned on German lines and for German requirements. The new railway will thus lie exclusively in territory under French and English protectorate, and will probably be their joint enterprise and property.

Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment of the solemn pledge of the Allies to liberate subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of the Turks, we have discussed the future of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia. All those are well defined districts, and the demarcation of their respective protectorates should not present great difficulties. But there remains, before we pass on to the problem of Constantinople, a further district less easily defined, largely inhabited by European peoples whose liberty in the future we are pledged to secure. This is the Mediterranean coastline to the south and west of Asia Minor, the towns of which have been so extensively peopled and made prosperous by Greeks and Italians. Similarly among those of our European Allies who are desirous and capable of Eastern expansion, there remains one, Italy, whose rights to partake in this Turkish partition we have not yet considered. In the shifting kaleidoscope of national war-politics, it seems at the moment of writing by no means impossible that Greece, having at length got rid of a treacherous and unstable Reuben of a monarch, may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, no doubt, she too would state the terms of her desired and legitimate expansion. But these would more reasonably be concerned with the redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which does not come within the scope of this book, and we may prophesy without fear of invoking the Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of seers, that Italy will legitimately claim (or perhaps has already claimed) the protectorate of this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when peace returns, the large population of Greeks and Italians once resident (and soon again to be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty and security which they will never enjoy so long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the hands that have earned the right to be protecting Power are assuredly Italian. Along the south coast a line including the Taurus range would seem to suggest a natural frontier inland from Adana on the east to the south-west corner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar strip would pass up the coast as far as, and inclusive of, Smyrna. That at least Italy has every right to expect, and there seems no great fear that among the International Councils there will arise a dissentient voice. The inland boundary on the west coast is the difficult section of this delimitation, and into the details of that it would be both rash and inexpedient to enter.

We pass, then, to the second avowed object of the Allies, namely, the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman rule, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilisation. This must be taken to include not only the expulsion of the Turkish control from Thrace and Constantinople, but from the eastern side as well of the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles. At no future time must Turkey be in a position to command even partially a single yard of that momentous channel through which alone our Allies, Russia and Rumania, have access to the Mediterranean. Though this was not formally stated in the Allies' reply to President Wilson, it is clearly part and parcel of the object in view, for while the Ottoman Empire retains the smallest control on either side of either of the Straits, she is so far able to interfere in European concerns, in which she must never more have a hand. The east shore, then, of the Straits and the Sea of Marmora, as well as the west, must be under the control of a Power, or a group of Powers, not alien to Western civilisation. Germany and her allies therefore, no less than Turkey, must be excluded from the guardianship of the Straits.

As we have had previous occasion to note, this ejection of the Turkish power from Constantinople is the absolute reversal of European and, in especial, of English policy for the last hundred years. No crime that the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development. But while Turkey can close the Straits at her own arbitrary will, or at the bidding of a superior and malevolent Power, and block the passage of ships from Russian and Rumanian ports into the Mediterranean, the economic development of both these countries is seriously menaced. Three times within the last six years has she exercised that right, and while she holds the shores of the Straits she can at any moment blockade all southern Russian ports. That such power should be in the hands of any nation is highly undesirable; that it should be in the hands of a corrupt despotism like Turkey, especially now that Germany, as things stand, can dictate to Turkey when and what she pleases, is a thing unthinkable by the most improvident of statesmen. Already we have paid dearly enough for the pusillanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible that we should ever allow a similar bill to be again presented. Whatever be the guardianship of the Straits, whoever the holder of Constantinople, it will not be Turkey.

At the beginning of the war, and indeed till after the revolution in Russia, it was announced and stated as an axiom that on the conclusion of peace, Russia should be the door-keeper of what after all is her own lodge-gate. Subsequently, in the unhappy splits and disintegration of her Government, it was announced that she favoured peace without annexation--in other words, that she neither claimed nor desired the guardianship of Constantinople. But I think we should be utterly wrong if we regarded that as an expression of the will of the Russian people: it is far more probable that it was the expression of the will of Germany, directly inspired by German influence with a view to concluding a separate peace with Russia. As we have seen, it had its due effect in Turkey, and Talaat Bey gave vent to pious ejaculations of thanksgiving, that now all cause of quarrel with Russia was removed, and Turkey and she could be friends. It is possible that when out of the confused cries there again rises from Russia the clear call of the people's voice, we shall find her wishing to set in order her own house before she projects herself on new missions, but, as far as the manifesto of 'peace without territorial annexation' goes, we shall be wise to regard it for the present with the profoundest suspicion. It sounds far more like the tones of the Central European wolf than those of Little Red Riding Hood's proper grandmother.

But be Russia's decision what it may, the Turk will hold sway no longer in Thrace or Constantinople, or on the shores of the Straits of the Sea of Marmora. There is, of course, no question of deporting the whole of the Turkish population that lives in those regions, nor would it be desirable, even if it were possible, to realise Gladstone's robust vision of seeing every Turk, 'bag and baggage,' clear out from the provinces they have desolated and profaned. But if not under Russia, then under the joint control of certain of the Allied Powers there will be a complete reconstruction of the administration of those districts. The headquarters of the protectorate will doubtless be at Constantinople, which will be reorganised somewhat on the lines of the Treaty Port of Shanghai, and will be open to the ships of all nations. The security of the town must be assured by a military garrison either of mixed troops of the controlling nations, or possibly by a rotation of troops drawn from the armies of each in turn. More important even than this will be the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A naval base must be formed, which by the gospel of the freedom of the seas (but not according to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will constitute a patrolling police force of the waters. Whether the system of fortifications and defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles impregnable shall be retained or not is a question demanding the most careful consideration. Some will hold that they should be maintained in order to insure that none but the guarantors of the freedom of the Straits shall ever take possession of them: others that they shall be utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the closing of the Straits shall be an impossibility. The matter really turns on the question as to the extent to which the Allies will have the prudence to cut Germany's claws when the war is over. It is eminently to be hoped that they will be cut so short that never again will they be able to show those chiselled talons beyond her velvet--that sense, in fact, will allow sentiment no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a great many people the basis of whose character consists of a washy confidence in the good intentions of everybody. Most mistakenly they call it Christianity.

Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the Allies' declared aims. Such territories as Turkey holds in Europe, such control as she possesses over the free passage of the Straits must pass from her, and the alien peoples, who for centuries have fainted and bled underneath her infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of bondage. As we have seen throughout preceding chapters, it was the fixed policy of the Ottoman Government to rid itself of their presence, and already it has gone far in its murderous mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the Allies, when accomplished, will do that work for her, for the Allies are determined to remove those peoples from Turkey. The difference of execution, however, consists in this, that they will not remove Arabs and Greeks and Italians and Jews, as Turkey has already done with the Armenians by the simple process of massacres, but by a process no less simple, namely, of taking out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire the districts where such peoples dwell. The Allies will accomplish, in fact, for the Turks that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim of Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim of his more murderous successors. Turkey shall henceforth be for the Turks: she shall no more be in 'danger' from the defenceless nations, who at present exist within her borders. The Sultan of Turkey, in some year of grace now not far distant, will find that his Ottomanisation has been done for him, and, though his realm is curtailed, he will have his rest broken no more by the thought of Arab risings, nor will he have to devise measures that will solve the Arab question. Except for a strip along the west and south coast, all Asia Minor and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the coast of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Mesopotamia shall have passed from him. It is no dismemberment of an Empire that the Allies contemplate, for they cannot dismember limbs that never belonged to the real trunk. It was a despotic military control that the Osmanlis had established, they always regarded their subject peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to destroy if they exhibited symptoms of progress and civilisation. Henceforth the Turkish Government shall govern Turks, and Turks alone. That for many years has been its aim, and, by the disastrous dispensation of fate, it has been largely able to realise its purpose. Now, though by different methods, the Allies will see thorough accomplishment of it. There will be no question, of course, of turning out or of deporting Turks who live in Syria, in Armenia, in Constantinople, for the ways of the Allies are not those of Talaat and Enver and Jemal the Great. Where to-day Turks dwell, there shall they continue to dwell, but they must dwell there in peace in equal liberties and rights with the once-subject peoples whom the Allies shall have delivered. If they do not like that they can migrate, not by forced marches and under the guardianship of murderous Kurds, but in protection and security, to the lands where they can still enjoy the beneficent sway of their own governors, and be Ottomanised to the top of their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and Greeks and Jews will be Ottomanised no longer.

The Turk was always a fighter, disciplined and courageous, and he has never lost that virtue of valour. But he has been a fighter because he has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services, and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for their lords and governors, who, until Prussia assumed command of the Turkish armies, there will no longer be either the possibility of further conquests as in the old Osmanli days, or, in less progressive times, the necessity for securing Ottoman supremacy over the huge ill-knit lands which it governed. But now, instead of having alien and defenceless tribes within their borders, tribes forbidden to bear arms and chafing at the Turkish yoke, they will see free peoples under the protectorates of Powers that are capable of self-defence and, if necessary, of inflicting punishment. Russia, France, England, Italy, all allied nations, will be established in close proximity to the Turkish frontiers, and the New Turkey will be as powerless for aggression as she will be for defence, should she provoke attack. But within their borders there may the Osmanlis dwell secure and undisturbed, so long as they conform to the habits of civilised people with regard to their neighbours, and it is a question whether, now that the military despotism which has always misguided the fortunes of this people, has no possible fields for conquest, and no need of securing security, the nation will not settle down into the quiet existence of small neutral countries. Perhaps the last chapter of its savage and blood-stained history is already almost finished, and in years to come some little light of progress and of civilisation may be kindled in the abode where the household gods for centuries have been cruelty and hate.

Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VII

THE GRIP OP THE OCTOPUS

It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the Allies' aims as regards Turkey to free from her barbarous control the subject peoples dwelling within her borders, for Turkey herself has to be delivered from a domination not less barbaric than her own, which, if allowed to continue, would soon again be a menace to the peace of the world. We have seen in a previous chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace envelops her, and we now have to consider how those tentacles must be unloosed from their grip, and what will be the condition of the victim, already bled white, when that has been done. In the beginning, as we have seen, Germany obtained her hold by professing a touchingly beautiful and philanthropic desire to help Turkey to realise her national ideals, and her Pecksniffs, Tekin Alp and Herr Ernst Marré, were bidden to write parallel histories, the one describing the aims of the Nationalist party, the other the benevolent interest which Germany took in them. Occasionally Herr Ernst Marré could not but remember that he was a German, and permitted us to see the claws of the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, but then he pulled the strings tight again, and only loud comfortable purrings could be heard, the Prussian musings over the 'liberation' of Turkey which she was helping to accomplish. But nowadays, so it seems to me, the strings have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are clearly visible. It is not so long since Dr. Schnee, Governor of German East Africa, sent a very illuminating document to Berlin from which I extract the following:--

'Do you consider it possible to make a regulation prohibiting Islam altogether? The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of Islam....'

That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in Alice in Wonderland:--

'After such kindness that would be A dismal thing to do.'

But I am afraid that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear. She has taken the Turkish oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes to sit down and eat them. And did she not also interfere in the affair of Jewish massacres and declare that 'Pan-Turkish ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine'? That must have been almost an unfriendly act from Turkey's point of view, for it cannot be stated too clearly that part of the price which Germany paid for Turkey's entry on her side into the war, was the liberty, as far as Germany was concerned, of managing her internal affairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the damnable doctrines of Ottomanisation. The other Powers could not interfere, for they failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany promised not to. That promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness.