Turkish Empire

“ Such is the present state of Turkey—universal corruption and oppression, and things going all the time from bad to worse.
And yet this wretched Government rules over the fairest portion of the globe. The Turkish Empire is territorially the finest in the world. Half in Europe and half in Asia, it extends over many degrees of latitude and longitude, including many countries and many climates, "spanning the vast arch from Bagdad to Belgrade." ”

“ Let us ask the question, Who and what are these Turks, whom Europe for her own sordid ends has petted and pampered and helped and supported? and the answer comes with striking force to-day over the lapse of a century, in the words of one of England’s greatest sons: “I have never before heard that the Turkish Empire has been considered any part of the balance of Powers in Europe. They despise and contemn all Christian princes as infidels, and only wish to subdue and exterminate them and their people. ”

“ The races which had been maltreated and massacred for centuries by the Turks’ could not transform themselves overnight into brothers, and the hatreds, jealousies, and religious prejudices of the past still divided Turkey into a medley of warring clans. Above all, the destructive wars and the loss of great sections of the Turkish Empire had destroyed the prestige of the new democracy. ”

“ The practical effect of the event, as I have said, was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all the world, excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia, and Italy, which for a century had held a threatening hand over the Ottoman Empire, had now lost all power to influence or control. The Turks now perceived that a series of dazzling events had changed them from cringing dependents of the European Powers into free agents. For the first time in two centuries they could now live their national life according to their own inclinations and govern their peoples according to their own will. ”

“ Constantinople under the Treaty of Sèvres is the free capital of the Turkish Empire under the reserve of the conditions which are contained in the treaty and limit exactly that liberty.
The force of Turkey has always been in her immense power of resistance. Win by resisting, wear out with the aid of time, which the Turks have considered not as an economic value, but as their friend. ”

“ The Turkish Empire, in the sense of the rule of an alien race over subject races, has practically ceased to exist in Europe. It survives in Asia and at its capital, Constantinople, under very different conditions. ”

“ When Turkey has finally jettisoned those encumbrances, the European vilayets, and withdrawn to Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire will probably gain considerably in strength by consolidation, and by carrying out many social and economical reforms which have been kept in abeyance during the constant trouble caused by the war-clouds that hung over Eastern Europe. A strong Turkish Empire in Asia Minor, real control over the tribes in Syria, strict surveillance of the eastern and north-eastern frontiers, will mean some prospect of peace in those very unsettled regions. ”

“ To-night we have to deal with a very small portion indeed of the Turkish Empire. These ladies have described principally the northern part of Macedonia, the country lying immediately round the southern and western parts of Servia, and also Montenegro. Now, the Turkish Government is a government without any parallel, so far as I know, in the world. It is a government established by conquest, and in that respect it is exceedingly like a great many other governments that have been established by conquest. ”

“ The Turkish empire remains not only intact, but will actually be found to have considerably increased in extent, if we include within it the territories of the Khedive of Egypt, whose arms have been carried to the Upper Nile and into Dar Fur.
We must guard ourselves, at the same time, against the assumption that Turkey has entered upon a path of normal progress. On the contrary, Turkey is a mediæval country still, and will have to pass through many intestine revolutions before it can rank with the civilised states of Europe or America. ”

“ That which, in my opinion, establishes the resources and vitality of the Turkish empire is, that if one of the serious struggles to which it has been exposed for the last forty years, were to have happened to any other power, it would either have crippled it or caused its entire destruction. ”

“ Thus the entry of Turkey into the war affected Great Britain and her allies, but yet cannot be said to have called for an expedition on our part to the eastern end of the Turkish Empire. Distances are huge in the country governed in name by the Sultan of Turkey, and in actual fact by the Young Turk party, who, let us explain, are themselves swayed, if not actually governed, by the emissaries of the Kaiser in Constantinople. ”

“ On broad lines it is now quite clear what form the future Turkish Empire will assume. From Tripolis across to Persia and on to the ridges of the Caucasus, German energy—without injury to the sovereignty of the Osmanic State—will coöperate in Turkey’s renaissance and in the development of her treasures. But our enemies, together with their money, languages and schools will disappear from the territories which they hoped to divide among themselves. [175]
Equally explicit is another German writer, Herr Trampe, respecting the ulterior object of the Bagdad Railway. ”

“ What was the justification for breaking up the Turkish Empire? The portions to be cut out of Turkey have a population the majority of which is non-Turkish. Cilicia and Southern Anatolia might constitute a possible exception. In these territories massacres and misgovernment had perhaps succeeded at last in turning the balance in favour of the Turk. But in the main the distributed regions were being cultivated and developed before the war by a population which was Western and not Turanian in its origin and outlook. This population represented the original inhabitants of the soil. ”

“ Nor are we fighting to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace which are predominantly Turkish in race. We do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople. ”

“ The Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Persians and others had broken away and set up their own governments. It was time for the Turks to protect what was left by adopting the same nationalist policy.
After their first success against the Sultan the Young Turks began to behave foolishly. They preached ‘Turkish brotherhood’; meaning no more than to rally together all men of Turkish blood. Turkey should be the absolute mistress of a subject empire in the modern French style; not merely the chief state of a religious Empire only bound together by the Arabic language and the Koran. ”

“ The work done by the new political power in Turkey appealed strongly to the great mass of the people in Western Europe, to those who had no experience of the East and its mysterious ways. The reformers, after years of strenuous effort, years spent in exile, broke in upon Abdul Hamid’s plans for maintaining Turkish ascendancy when Niazi Bey raised the standard of revolt in 1908, and threatened to march on Constantinople with the Second and Third Army Corps. ”

“ If they are really capable of radical improvement, if they can live upon equal terms with the Christians, and establish a good government, so much the better. If things go on as they have done lately, the Turks will be gradually squeezed out, as the Americans say, by the increase in numbers, wealth and intelligence of the Christians. I am not one of those who look upon the Turkish Empire as good per se—to be upheld at all hazards—but in the interest of all parties, I should like to let it down gently ”

“ In less than a quarter of a century the German net has been cast over the whole body of the Turkish Empire. German diplomacy is paramount to-day in Constantinople. The Turkish Army has been reorganised upon the Prussian system, and is under German control. The finances of the Turkish Empire are gradually becoming a dependency to the German banks by loans and concessions, which are constantly increasing. ”

“ The Young Turks above all things desired the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and a union of her peoples that would make the Empire strong. On the other hand, the non-Mussulman revolutionaries cared nothing for the integrity of the Empire. For the most part they desired not to reform Turkey, but to break her up. Neither did they seek union among themselves; for the different Christian races hated each other, and cherished mutually incompatible ambitions. ”

“ That a State so raised, so maintained, should act as an organization for protecting and furthering the interests of its subjects, of whatever race or creed, is not to be expected, neither did the great body of the Turkish nation ever wish it to assume such functions. For the Turks were the dominant race, the conquerors, and to them any idea of their non-Islamic, non-Turk fellow-subjects as equals was inconceivable ”

“ Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish tekkes at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction. ”

“ The danger to Turkey in its Eastern provinces of Asia Minor and in its European provinces in Macedonia and Epirus is the comparison between the condition of those who were freed in 1878 from the Sultan’s rule, and who have become self-governing, as in the case of the Bulgarians, or have gone under the rule of Austria, Russia, or Greece, with those who remain the subjects of Turkish rule. When, on one side of mere geographical lines, without any physical difference, the populations are flourishing and improvements of all kinds in roads, railways, harbours, schools, etc., are being effected ”

“ It may be taken for granted that the Ottoman Empire as a European Power is a thing of the past, that all those provinces carved out of Europe by the sword of Othman have been lost by the sword, and that of Turkey in Europe nothing remains but the strips of land which the Allies are pleased to leave to their old enemy. Constantinople will remain Turkish for some time yet—ten years, perhaps fifteen—but methinks the Turk is tired of his stay in Europe, that he will soon pack up his small possessions and return to Asia Minor, whence he came. ”

“ Those who know, and there are many, though they keep their convictions secret, are aware that inefficiency has brought the East down before the organized, purposeful West, and that the days of Turkish rule in Europe are numbered, that the Ottoman Empire this side of the Bosphorus is as much doomed as was that of{323} ancient Byzant when Amurath made Adrianople his capital.
The great majority of Turks appear to be of the same mind as Ali, the master-weaver; they know little of what is happening, they seem to care less. ”

“ In my opinion, I have been a far better friend to the Ottoman Empire than have the Sultan and his advisers. I have always recommended the granting of reasonable powers of local self-government, which would have saved Turkey from terrible losses. This good advice has been spurned, and in consequence Turkey has lost 18,000,000 of people, and may lose more. Pray weigh these words.”—
The birthday of the Ex-Premier was made the occasion for an anti-Turkish demonstration. ”

“ The usual course of such campaigns was that the Turks, having captured the fortresses in the invaded districts, either annexed them to their Empire, as in the case of Eastern Hungary and Mesopotamia, or compelled the vanquished State to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Sultan and to pay tribute, as in the case of Western Hungary, or retired, leaving the ravaged country so destitute of supplies that the enemy could not follow up the retreating army. ”

“ Turkey only requires forbearance on the part of its allies, and a determination not to press their claims in a manner humiliating to the dignity and independence of the Sultan—that friendly support, in short, which among States as well as individuals the weak are entitled to expect from the strong—in order not only to prolong its existence but to remove all cause for alarm respecting its dissolution.
It will be seen that the British Government took much too sanguine a view of the prospects of reformed Government in Turkey, and that the Emperor of Russia was much nearer the mark. ”

“ And while this mass of suffering Eastern humanity was but fitfully and quite inadequately cared for by the Turkish authorities, Western humanity was putting forth its finest efforts to alleviate this awful distress by all the means of Western civilization, against which the Turk is making his last stand. In the old Seraglio, at Galata and Pera hospitals have been opened to receive the sick and wounded soldiers of the Sultan, and they now readily make their way to where the Red Crescent flies by the side of the{154} ensigns of Great European Powers. ”