Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 4

forced them into
subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included
in that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control.
Turkey in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea
of Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and
the only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe
the existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange
political phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of
Power. No one of the Great Powers, from fear of the complications that
would ensue, could risk the expulsion of the Turkish Government from
Constantinople, and there all through the nineteenth century it has been
maintained lest the Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked the bolts that
barred Russia's development into the Mediterranean, should lead to
such a war as we are now passing through. That policy, for the present,
has utterly defeated its own ends, for the key is in the pockets of
Prussia. But all through that century, though the Powers maintained
Turkey there, they helped to liberate, or saw liberate themselves, the
various Christian kingdoms in Europe over which at the beginning of
the eighteenth century Turkey exercised a military despotism. They
weakened her in so far as they could, but they one and all refused to let
her die, and above all refused to give her that stab in the heart which
would have been implied in her expulsion from Constantinople.

For centuries from the first appearance of the Osmanlis in north-west
Asia Minor down to the reign of Abdul Hamid, the Empire maintained
itself, with alternate bouts of vigour and relapses, on the general
principle of drawing its strength from its subject peoples. Internally,
from whatever standpoint we view it, whether educational, economic,
or industrial, it has had the worst record of any domination known to
history. Rich in mineral wealth, possessed of lands that were once the
granary of the world, watered by amazing rivers, and with its strategic
position on the Mediterranean that holds the master-key of the Black
Sea in its hands, it has remained the most barbaric and least progressive
of all states. Its roads and means of communication remained up till the
last quarter of the nineteenth century much as they had been in the days
of Osman; except along an insignificant strip of sea-coast railways
were non-existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in morals, and did not
contain a single seed that might ripen into progress or civilisation.
Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, capable of
supporting not itself alone, but half the civilised world: nowadays,
under the stewardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to become a
desert for the greater part of the year and an impracticable swamp for
the remainder. Where great cities flourished, where once was reared the
pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, there huddle the squalid huts of
fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living
from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of
metropolitan cities. The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of
irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the end
of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an
agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and
the flails of more than two thousand years ago. But so long as there was
a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and his
corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert their
leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung from
starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of those
who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash for
the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the cultivation
of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled husbandman, or
for the exploitation and development of its internal wealth. While there
was left in the emaciated carcase of the Turkish Empire enough live

tissue for the cancerous Government to grow fat on, it gave not one
thought to the welfare of all those races on whom it had fastened itself.
Province after province of its European dominions might be lost to it,
but the Balance of Power still kept the Sultan on his throne, and left the
peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his mercy. They were largely of
alien religion and of alien tongue, and their individual weakness was
his strength. Neglect, and the decay consequent on neglect, was the lot
of all who languished under that abominable despotism.
With the accession in 1876 of Abdul Hamid, of cursed memory,