Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 2

something which gave great offence then about the
advisability of putting Turkey out of his misery. I do not pretend to
quote correctly, but that was the gist of it. Nor do I challenge the truth
of Lord Aberdeen's phrase at the period when he made it. It possibly
contained a temporary truth, a valid point of view, which, if it had been
acted on, might have saved a great deal of trouble afterwards, but it
missed then, and more than misses now, the essential and salient truth
about Turkey. The phrase, unfortunately, still continued to obtain credit,
and nowadays it is a forgery; it rings false.
For at whatever period we regard Turkey, and try to define that
monstrous phenomenon, we can make a far truer phrase than Lord
Aberdeen's. For Turkey is not a sick man: Turkey is a sickness. He is
not sick, nor ever has been, for he is the cancer itself, the devouring
tumour that for centuries has fed on living tissue, absorbing it and
killing it. It has never had life in itself, except in so far that the power
of preying on and destroying life constitutes life, and such a power,
after all, we are accustomed to call not life, but death. Turkey, like
death, continues to exist and to dominate, through its function of killing.

Life cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and from the moment
that Turkey passed from being a nomadic tribe moving westwards from
the confines of Persia, it has existed only and thrived on a process of
absorption and of murder. When first the Turks came out of their
Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when they grew more or less settled,
and by degrees the power of mere absorption, as by some failure of
digestion, left them, they killed. They became a huge tumour, that
nourished itself by killing the living tissues that came in contact with it.
Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas than
could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds of
years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying character,
Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with greater
organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is threatened by
a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its crab-pincers
into the cancer that came out of Asia. Those claws are already deeply
set, and the problem for civilised nations is first to disentangle the
nippers that are cancer in a cancer, and next to deprive of all power
over alien peoples the domination that has already been allowed to
exist too long.
The object of this book is the statement of the case on which all
defenders of liberty base their prosecution against Turkey itself, and
against the Power that to-day has Turkey in its grip.
Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but in order to understand at all
adequately the case against Turkey as a ruler and controller of subject
peoples, it is necessary to go, though briefly, into her blood-stained
genealogy. There is no need to enter into ethnological discussions as to
earlier history, or define the difference between the Osmanli Turks and
those who were spread over Asia Minor before the advent of the
Osmanlis from the East. But it was the Osmanlis who were the
cancerous and devouring nation, and it is they who to-day rule over a
vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples alien to them by religion
and blood and all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until Germany,
'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a champion of
murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and literature
and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare with the

anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914, there
was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and cross-bones,
and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land and on sea,
and Germany showed herself an anachronism worthy to impale her
arms on the shield of the most execrable domination that has ever
oppressed the world since the time when the Huns under Attila raged
like a forest fire across the cultivated fields of European civilisation.
To-day, in the name of Kultur, a similar invasion has broken on shores
that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it has found its most
valuable victim and ally in the Power that adopted the same methods of
absorption and extermination centuries before the Hohenzollerns ever
started on their career of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and
perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our astonishing diplomacy in
Constantinople that Turkey, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in
her lot with the Power that by