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What a howl would have been raised had the Mussulmans done this thing!

So the Christian had plenty of friends and the Turk few. No voices were raised to defend him and to explain the injustice that was done him. Neither was he the man to put his own case before his European critics; for the Turk is better with the sword than with the pen; he is not so cunning as Greek or Bulgarian in carrying on a newspaper campaign, or in the weaving of effective misrepresentations; as a rule he is too proud to defend himself against calumny, and treats with silent contempt those who snarl at him. Moreover the Turk, being essentially a patriot, would not appeal for help to foreign Governments as did the Christians. To quote from an article recently written by Halil Halid: "The Mussulmans suffered as much as, indeed in many places more than, the Christians, from a despotic régime. They had submitted, not to the will of their rulers, but to their hard fate, because Turkish patriotism, which has not until recently received fitting attention, was too great to allow them to invite outside interference or help in the national struggle against native tyranny. Never despairing of gaining their end, the people of Turkey have waited for an opportune moment to strike a blow at the foundations of despotism, and this promptly and with the least possible risk of international complications. They have thus submitted

to the indignities and hardships caused by the tyranny of their own rulers, rather than expose themselves to the patronising interference of any foreign Power."

There are thus excuses for the misunderstanding that poisoned the minds of so many Englishmen against our former friends the Turks. Greeks, Bulgarians and others who sought the dismemberment of Turkey and the appropriation of Macedonia voiced their cause loudly, not only with just denunciations of the Turkish oppression of the Christians, but with many plausible inventions. That the Turkish side of the question was so rarely heard was also largely due to the fact that, during the few years preceding the revolution, it became ever more difficult for Englishmen in Turkey to have friendly intercourse with the Turks themselves. The intervention of our Government to introduce reforms into Turkey, and the action of our Balkan and Armenian Committees, which were wrongly believed by the Sultan and his advisers-and appear still to be believed by all Germans and Austrians-to be the agents in advance of our perfidious Government, so intensified the hatred of the Turkish despotism against England that it was practically made a crime for a Turk, especially if he was suspected of Liberal tendencies, to receive an Englishman into his house. If a Turk was even seen to speak to an Englishman in Constantinople the spies.

reported the fact to the Palace; and, as I shall explain later, to manifest sympathy for the British cost many a Turk his life and liberty. Thus the intelligent tourist, or the globe-trotting M.P., who visited Constantinople in those days, was not in a position to pick up accurate information. His doings and goings would probably be watched by spies, especially if he was a member of the Balkan Committee. Though he knew it not, he would find no opportunity of conversing with Turks save such as were the secret agents of the Palace. His dragomans would be Greeks or Armenians, who might speak to him of the grievances of the Christian subjects of the Sultan, but certainly not of the grievances of the Turks. So, too, was it with most of the journalists. If they were antiTurks they sought information from the members of the Greek and Bulgarian bands, and if they were pro-Turks they were on friendly terms with officialdom-they had audiences with ministers, possibly with the Sultan himself; and as all Turks are very polite, they often left the audiencechamber charmed with despotism, and explained, in the papers they represented, that the Young Turk party was either a myth or a small and impotent group of malcontents, who, during a sojourn in Paris, had absorbed the wild theories of the internationalists and anarchists.

To drive the Turks "bag and baggage" out of Europe was the proclaimed policy of many

ignorant humanitarians. The explusion of the Turkish rule would indeed have been followed by a bag-and-baggage exodus, for but a small minority of Mussulmans would have remained in the land to be governed by a Christian race. In former years Russia and Austria were regarded as the probable inheritors of the "Sick Man's" European territories, and it is certain that the rule of either of these would be intolerable to the Turks. One remembers how the Circassian and Bosnian Mussulmans emigrated in large numbers into Turkey when their countries were occupied respectively by the Russians and Austrians. These emigrations were accompanied by great suffering and loss of life, due largely to the incapacity and callousness of the Turkish Government, which, while undertaking to found colonies of the refugees in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and other parts of the Empire, practically left them to starve. The humanitarians would have realised the cruelty of their proposal had they seen, as I did, the pitiful sights in Northern Albania thirty years ago. The Bosnian Mussulman peasants, escaping from the rule of Austria, were pouring into that portion of Turkish territory. Men, women and children were slowly crawling across the snow-covered country in the bitter winter weather, weak and listless with hunger and cold, often frost-bitten, hundreds of them failing by the way, so that it was a common

thing to see frozen corpses lying by the roadside. The Albanians themselves were in a half-starving condition after the ravages of the war, and could render little assistance to the wretched refugees. Under the bag-and-baggage scheme there would be an exodus of millions and unimaginable suffering. Had Europe committed this crime the retribution might have been heavy. The Sultan would still have been the Caliph of the Moslem world, and the Turks, driven into Asia, might have reformed their Government and set their house in order, even as they are doing now; but the Turkish awakening, instead of taking its present form, would have taken that of Pan-Islamismthe combination against the Christians of all the Mussulman peoples.

The humane bag-and-baggage proposal would have meant the expulsion of nearly half the population of Turkey and the replacement of the Turkish by some other rule. But the Russianisation or Germanisation of the Balkan Peninsula would have been more disagreeable to the Christian population than even the domination of the Turk, while it would have been impossible to divide the country among the neighbouring states in such a way as to satisfy the inhabitants. In the peninsula are jumbled up remnants of every race and creed, not collected into separate districts, but intermingling with each other, hating each other, jealous of each other-Servians dreaming of the larger

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