If Constantinople should be lost, the Arab-speaking parts of the empire would in all likelihood break away, carrying the Holy Cities with them. When the constant risk of this consummation, with the cataclysmic nature of its consequences is considered, one marvels why the Committee, which has shown no mean understanding of some conditions essential to Osmanli empire, should have done so little hitherto to conciliate Arab susceptibilities. Neither in the constitution of the parliament nor in the higher commands of the army have the Arab-speaking peoples been given anything like their fair share; and loudly and insistently have they protested. Perhaps the Committee, whose leading members are of a markedly Europeanized type, understands Asia less well than Europe. Certainly its programme of Ottomanization, elaborated by military ex-attachés, by Jew bankers and officials from Salonika, and by doctors, lawyers, and other intellectuels fresh from Paris, was conceived on lines which offered the pure Asiatic very little scope. The free and equal Osmanlis were all to take their cue from men of the Byzantine sort which the European provinces, and especially the city of Constantinople, breed. After the revolution, nothing in Turkey struck one so much as the apparition on the top of things everywhere of a type of Osmanli who has the characteristic qualities of the Levantine Greek. Young officers, controlling their elders, only needed a change of uniform to pass in an Athenian crowd. Spare and dapper officials, presiding in seats of authority over Kurds and Arabs, reminded one of Greek journalists. Osmanli journalists themselves treated one to rhodomontades punctuated with restless gesticulation, which revived memories of Athenian cafés in war-time. It was the Byzantine triumphing over the Asiatic; and the most Asiatic elements in the empire were the least likely to meet with the appreciation or sympathy of the Byzantines.
Are the Arab-speaking peoples, therefore, likely to revolt, or be successful in splitting the Ottoman Empire, if they do? The present writer would like to say, in parenthesis, that, in his opinion, this consummation of the empire is not devoutly to be wished. The substitution of Arab administration for Osmanli would necessarily entail European tutelage of the parts of the Arab-speaking area in which powers, like ourselves, have vital interests—Syria, for example, southern Mesopotamia, and, probably, Hejaz. The last named, in particular, would involve us in so ticklish and thankless a task, that one can only be thankful for the Turkish caretaker there to-day, and loth to see him dismissed.
An Arab revolt, however, might break out whether the Triple Entente desired its success or not. What chance of success would it have? The peoples of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire are a congeries of differing races, creeds, sects, and social systems, with no common bond except language. The physical character of their land compels a good third of them to be nomadic, predatory barbarians, feared by the other two-thirds. The settled folk are divided into Moslem and Christian (not to mention a large Jewish element), the cleavage being more abrupt than in western Turkey and the tradition and actual spirit of mutual enmity more separative. Further, each of those main creed-divisions is subdivided. Even Islam in this region includes a number of incompatible sects, such as the Ansariye, the Metawali, and the Druses in the Syrian mountains, Shiite Arabs on the Gulf coast and the Persian border, with pagan Kurds and Yezidis in the latter region and north Mesopotamia. As for the Christians, their divisions are notorious, most of these being subdivided again into two or more hostile communions apiece. It is almost impossible to imagine the inhabitants of Syria concerting a common plan or taking common action. The only elements among them which have shown any political sense or capacity for political organization are Christian. The Maronites of the Lebanon are most conspicuous among these; but neither their numbers nor their traditional relations with their neighbours qualify them to form the nucleus of a free united Syria. The ‘Arab Movement’ up to the present has consisted in little more than talk and journalese. It has not developed any considerable organization to meet that stable efficient organization which the Committee of Union and Progress has directed throughout the Ottoman dominions.
As for the rest of the empire, Asia Minor will stand by the Osmanli cause, even if Europe and Constantinople, and even if the Holy Places and all the Arab-speaking provinces be lost. Its allegiance does not depend on either the tradition of Roum or the caliphate, but on essential unity with the Osmanli nation. Asia Minor is the nation. There, prepared equally by Byzantine domination and by Seljukian influence, the great mass of the people long ago identified itself insensibly and completely with the tradition and hope of the Osmanlis. The subsequent occupation of the Byzantine capital by the heirs of the Byzantine system, and their still later assumption of caliphial responsibility, were not needed to cement the union. Even a military occupation by Russia or by another strong power would not detach Anatolia from the Osmanli unity; for a thing cannot be detached from itself. But, of course, that occupation might after long years cause the unity itself to cease to be.
Such an occupation, however, would probably not be seriously resisted or subsequently rebelled against by the Moslem majority in Asia Minor, supposing Osmanli armaments to have been crushed. The Anatolian population is a sober, labouring peasantry, essentially agricultural and wedded to the soil. The levies for Yemen and Europe, which have gone far to deplete and exhaust it of recent years, were composed of men who fought to order and without imagination, steadily and faithfully, as their fathers had fought. They have no lust for war, no Arabian tradition of fighting for its own sake, and little, if any, fanaticism. Attempts to inspire Anatolian troops with religious rage in the Balkan War were failures. They were asked to fight in too modern a way under too many Teutonic officers. The result illustrated a prophecy ascribed to Ghasri Mukhtar Pasha. When German instructors were first introduced into Turkey, he foretold that they would be the end of the Ottoman army. No, these Anatolians desire nothing better than to follow their plough-oxen, and live their common village life, under any master who will let them be.
Elements of the Christian minority, however, Armenian and Greek, would give trouble with their developed ideas of nationality and irrepressible tendency to ‘Europize’. They would present, indeed, problems of which at present one cannot foresee the solution. It seems inevitable that an autonomous Armenia, like an autonomous Poland, must be constituted ere long; but where? There is no geographical unit of the Ottoman area in which Armenians are the majority. If they cluster more thickly in the vilayets of Angora, Sivas, Erzerum, Kharput, and Van, i.e. in easternmost Asia Minor, than elsewhere, and form a village people of the soil, they are consistently a minority in any large administrative district. Numerous, too, in the trans-Tauric vilayets of Adana and Aleppo, the seat of their most recent independence, they are townsmen in the main, and not an essential element of the agricultural population. Even if a considerable proportion of the Armenians, now dispersed through towns of western Asia Minor and in Constantinople, could be induced to concentrate in a reconstituted Armenia (which is doubtful, seeing how addicted they are to general commerce and what may be called parasitic life), they could not fill out both the Greater and the Lesser Armenias of history, in sufficient strength to overbear the Osmanli and Kurdish elements. The widest area which might he constituted an autonomous Armenia with good prospect of self-sufficiency would be the present Russian province, where the head-quarters of the national religion lie, with the addition of the provinces of Erzerum, Van, and Kharput.
But, if Russia had brought herself to make a self-denying ordinance, she would have to police her new Armenia very strongly for some years; for an acute Kurdish problem would confront it, and no concentration of nationals could be looked for from the Armenia Irredenta of Diarbekr, Urfa, Aleppo, Aintab, Marash, Adana, Kaisariyeh, Sivas, Angora, and Trebizond (not to mention farther and more foreign towns), until public security was assured in what for generations has been a cockpit. The Kurd is, of course, an Indo-European as much as the Armenian, and rarely a true Moslem; but it would be a very long time indeed before these facts reconciled him to the domination of the race which he has plundered for three centuries. Most of the Osmanlis of eastern Asia Minor are descendants of converted Armenians; but their assimilation would be slow and doubtful. Islam, more rapidly and completely than any other creed, extinguishes racial sympathies and groups its adherents anew.
The Anatolian Greeks are less numerous but not less difficult to provide for. The scattered groups of them on the plateau—in Cappadocia, Pontus, the Konia district—and on the eastward coast-lands would offer no serious difficulty to a lord of the interior. But those in the western river-basins from Isbarta to the Marmora, and those on the western and north-western littorals, are of a more advanced and cohesive political character, imbued with nationalism, intimate with their independent nationals, and actively interested in Hellenic national politics. What happens at Athens has long concerned them more than what happens at Constantinople; and with Greece occupying the islands in the daily view of many of them, they are coming to regard themselves more and more every day as citizens of Graecia Irredenta. What is to be done with these? What, in particular, with Smyrna, the second city of the Ottoman Empire and the first of ‘Magna Graecia’? Its three and a half hundred thousand souls include the largest Greek urban population resident in any one city. Shall it be united to Greece? Greece herself might well hesitate. It would prove a very irksome possession, involving her in all sorts of continental difficulties and risks. There is no good frontier inland for such an enclave. It could hardly be held without the rest of westernmost Asia, from Caria to the Dardanelles, and in this region the great majority of the population is Moslem of old stocks, devotedly attached both to their faith and to the Osmanli tradition.
The present writer, however, is not among the prophets. He has but tried to set forth what may delay and what may precipitate the collapse of an empire, whose doom has been long foreseen, often planned, invariably postponed; and, further, to indicate some difficulties which, being bound to confront heirs of the Osmanlis, will be better met the better they are understood before the final agony—If this is, indeed, to be!