Heinrich von Treitschke loved many things more than liberty, but the profanation of liberty by the Turk drew from him a denunciation as strong as Gladstone’s own. “A near future,” he writes, “will, it is to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such heathendom should ever have established itself on European soil. What has this Turkish Empire done in three entire centuries? It has done nothing but destroy.”
Treitschke and Gladstone, men who stood for very different ideals in Europe, both called with one voice for liberation from the Turk; and the Allies are struggling now to bring what they strove for to completion.
The Principle of Nationalities.
In the settlement of Turkey, conspicuously, the Allies will be crowning a historic task, at which they themselves have laboured in former times. The liberation of the subject peoples of Turkey, and the reorganisation upon the principle of nationalities of countries under the Sultan’s murderous tyranny, began a century ago with the national struggles for independence of the Serbs and Greeks—struggles which were part of the general struggle for freedom in Europe, and which gave inspiration to the people of other subject lands. England, France and Russia stepped in in 1827 to secure Greece the reward of her heroism when she was almost succumbing to her oppressor; Russia compelled Turkey to recognise Serbian autonomy in her treaty of peace with Turkey in 1831; Russia again, by taking up arms in 1877, freed Rumania and Serbia from Turkish suzerainty, liberated more of their oppressed brethren for Serbia and Greece, and restored Bulgaria to national existence. In the Balkan War of 1912-13, the Balkan nations carried on the work by their unaided strength, and expelled the Ottoman Empire from all the provinces over which it still tyrannised in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople and Thrace. In 1916, the Sherif of Mecca, at the opposite extremity of the Ottoman conqueror’s domain, liberated an Arab province and the Holy Arab City of which he is the legitimate head. It is for the Entente to liberate the Arabs of Syria and the Armenians, who cannot save themselves.
The Syrians and Armenians have not, as the Turks and Germans allege, been disloyal to Turkey in her hour of danger. The Arab and Armenian conscripts have fought dutifully for a cause not their own in the Balkan War and in the present more terrible conflict. Their leaders are too prudent and the people too peaceable, their stake is too great, their forces are too scattered, to allow them for a moment to contemplate rising in arms. But their loyal and straightforward conduct has not preserved them from the ferocity of their Turkish rulers; it has only exposed them to a cold-blooded scheme of extermination which the Young Turks are prosecuting at this moment with all their might. The redemption of these innocent peoples from the hell into which they have been cast, and where they will remain in agony so long as Ottoman and Prussian militarism holds out, is incumbent upon the Allies if they are to redeem their plighted word.
Constantinople.
This is what the Allies owe in the settlement of Turkey to the principle of nationalities. But they are further pledged to vindicate the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development, and this touches the status of Constantinople.
Constantinople, since the Turks conquered it from its last Christian Emperor in 1453, has been the political capital of the Ottoman Empire. But ever since it has been a city at all, it has also been the strategical and economic key to the Black Sea, conditioning the security and dominating the economic development of all peoples bordering on the Black Sea coasts. It is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. It is the Turk’s at present by right of conquest, but that right justifies his expulsion by war if it justifies his original intrusion, and on broader considerations of population, sentiments, traditions and monuments of the past, Constantinople is more truly the capital of all the Christian peoples of the East. But it is not the exclusive possession of any of its native inhabitants, whether their presence there dates from more ancient or from comparatively recent times. The most important quarter in Constantinople is Pera, across the Golden Horn, which is inhabited by a foreign mercantile community, as international in its composition as the mercantile community in the Chinese “Treaty Port” of Shanghai. The chief volume of the transit trade which gives Constantinople its rank as a port, passes through these foreign residents’ hands. But even they are not the parties most vitally concerned in the economic status of Constantinople and the Straits. If conditions do not suit them, they can transfer their business elsewhere. The parties to whom the destiny of Constantinople is a matter of life and death are Russia and Rumania, two countries bound for ever by their geographical position to conduct their maritime trade through the Black Sea and the Straits that give entrance to it, and therefore at the mercy economically of any third power that holds the control of the Straits in its hands.
The Right to Full Security.
And this is not a theoretical question. It is a practical problem for the national economy of Russia every year, and introduces a factor of uncertainty into Russia’s national trading which is profoundly detrimental to her prosperity. As sovereign of the Straits, Turkey not only possesses the technical right of closing the Straits to shipping; she exercises it in an arbitrary fashion. Three times the Straits have been closed by Turkey within the last half-dozen years—during her war with Italy, during the war with the Balkan States, and after the outbreak of the European war at a date previous to the intervention of Turkey herself in the struggle. It is possibly arguable that the closing was necessary in each of these cases from a military point of view, to safeguard Turkey’s political ownership of these “territorial waters.” But if so, that is in itself the strongest argument for taking out of the hands of an independent, irresponsible government a highway of commerce the proper regulation of which is essential to the economic well-being of the Russian and Rumanian peoples. Even if Turkey were a friendly, steady-going State, the situation would hardly be tolerable; but actually, whether through fault or misfortune, she has been at war more often during the last century than any other State in the world, and her hostility has been directed principally against Russia, the country most vitally affected by the disturbance of the traffic through the Straits. The closing of the Straits in the last instance, when Russia was at war with Germany and was in urgent need of the importation of supplies, can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a hostile act—an anticipation of the open war which Turkey made on Russia within the next few weeks. To leave this economic weapon in Turkey’s hands at the peace settlement would be impossible. By closing the Straits in any given year at the precise moment when the Russian harvest was shipped and ready to sail, and when the Russian importers had made their annual foreign purchases on credit up to the full prospective value which the harvest would realise in the markets of the world, Turkey could threaten Russia with a financial crisis verging on national bankruptcy. Full security and free economic development for Russia would have vanished beyond the horizon, and not only for Russia but for the whole world, for with such a trump card in their hands, Turkey and her German patrons could never resist the temptation of waging an economic “war after the war,” which might bring Russia to her knees and enable them to realise those ambitions against her which they have been unable to realise by force of arms.