Now Turkey is completely bankrupt, and we must ask ourselves why Germany ever bargained for the repayment in gold, after the war, of the millions she had lent the Turks in paper, if she knew that Turkey could never repay her. True, the loans had only cost her the paper the notes were printed on, so that in no case could she prove a loser, but how could she be a gainer? The answer to that question shouts at us from every acre of Turkish soil. The immense undeveloped riches of Turkey supply the answer. Some indeed are already being developed, and the labour and most of the materials have been paid for by the German paper notes. There are the irrigation works at Adana, there is the beet-sugar industry at Konia, the irrigation works in the Makischelin Valley, the mineral concessions of the Bagdad Railway, the Haidar Pasha Harbour concessions, the afforestation scheme near Constantinople, the cotton industry in Anatolia--there is no end to them. Turkey may not be able to pay in cash, but over all these concessions already working, and over a hundred more, of which the concessions have been granted, Germany has a complete hold, and her victim will pay in minerals and cotton and sugar and corn. She will pay over and over and over again, as none who have the smallest knowledge of Kultur-finance can possibly doubt. She is bled white already, and for the rest of time bloodless and white will she remain. Only one event can possibly avert her fate, and that is the victory of the Allies.
We have been so bold as to assume that this is not an impossible contingency, and on that assumption there is a brighter future for Turkey than the Prussian domination could ever bring her. Bankrupt she is, but, as Germany saw, she is rich in possibilities even with regard to the restricted territory to which she will surely find herself limited, and it is a pleasant chance for her that Germany has already been so busy in developing the resources of Anatolia. For Germany may safely bet her last piece of paper money that she will not lay a finger on them.
The Turkey of the future is to be for the Turks; not for the persecuted Armenians, nor for the Arabs, nor for the Greeks, and assuredly it is not to be for the Prussians. While the war lasts, Germany may draw supplies from the fields her artificial manures have enriched, and from the acres that her paper money has planted, but after that no more. Her Ottomanising work will be over. Such development (and it is far from negligible) as she has done in Syria will be continued under French protection for the Arabs, such as she has done in Mesopotamia under English protection, and such as she has done in Anatolia will be continued by the Turks to drag them out of the utter insolvency that she has brought them to. Never before has a country so justly and so richly deserved the repudiation of a debt incurred by the confidence trick. Not a civilised Government in the world would dream of enforcing payment, any more than a magistrate would enforce a payment to some thimble-rigger returning from a race-meeting.
The roar of battle still renders inaudible all voices save its own, but already the dusk begins to gather over the halls where sit the War-lord and those who, for the realisation of their monstrous dreams, loosed hell upon the world, and in the growing dusk there begin to steal upon the wall the letters of pale flame that to them portend the doom, and to us give promise of dawn. Faintly they can see the legend Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin....
THE END