Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of 1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide and empty.

[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918 by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their (the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in any vilayet.”

IV

THE RUSSIAN MENACE

HOW RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOUGHT ACROSS THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE—​HOW RUSSIA ENTERED TRANS-CAUCASIA AND CAME INTO CONTACT WITH THE ARMENIANS—​HOW IT APPROACHED THE BACK OF BRITISH INDIA THROUGH CENTRAL ASIA—​HOW GREAT BRITAIN FINALLY SURRENDERED IN THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907.

Old Russia was a great Eastern absolutism which had looked upon the modern West and faithfully copied the methods of its imperialism. These it utilized in its search for a secure outlet to the sea. It had reached the sea at Archangel on the Arctic, but Archangel is blocked by ice for nine months of the year. It had reached the sea along the Baltic shores, but its Baltic ports were as landlocked as the Lake ports in the United States. The Baltic was commanded by Germany and Germany in turn was commanded by Great Britain. It had touched salt water along the Black Sea, but its Black Sea ports were commanded by the Ottoman Empire astride the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

It was unable to rectify its position in the Baltic without precipitating a European war and European wars are not only expensive but to Eastern Powers like Russia are sometimes disastrous. It spent the better part of a century in trying to solve its Black Sea problem by hewing back the Ottoman Empire and attempting to fasten its control over the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople. But the Straits had already become the most vulnerable spot in the armor of the British Indian sea lines and the Ottoman Sultan was accordingly backed by all the influence which the great British Embassy in Constantinople could exert.

Thus when Russia compelled the Sultan to pay its price for stopping Mohammed Ali’s drive up the Syrian corridor from Egypt in 1832, Great Britain did not hesitate to quash Russia’s treaty with the Sultan. And when the issues which the quashing of that treaty had left unsettled, were revived twenty years later, Great Britain did not hesitate to enter the Crimean War to hold Russia back from any further approach to the Straits. And when twenty years still later, the Mother Slav State, following the lead of the South Slavs of Serbia, declared war on the Sultan and smashed its way into San Stefano in the very suburbs of Constantinople, the British Navy did not hesitate to steam boldly up the Straits and anchor off the Ottoman capital. For if the Russian Army had been permitted to occupy it, the British sea lines from India might easily have been thrown back to the long Cape route and another Trafalgar necessitated in order to settle again the question of the command of the Mediterranean, a question which the British Navy did not propose to re-open.

So we reach that titanic struggle between two outside imperialisms which kept the Ottoman Empire tied hand and foot but still alive. Against Russia, Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together. It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.