disturbed, it was usually restored by the political expedient of a massacre. These massacres were sometimes very cruel and bloody, sometimes less so. A massacre might last a few hours only or drag on for days. But it always began on a prearranged signal and ended on a given signal. The actual incentive to massacre was in some cases religious fanaticism and in others the lust for plunder and bloodshed, but it was the government that planned, ordered and abetted the massacres, and without its sanction they would have been impossible. In 1894, when the series of Armenian massacres planned and perpetrated by Abdul Hamid was just beginning, a Turk in a village not far from Ismidt warned his partner, an Armenian, that a massacre was to take place in that village on a certain day, and that it would be his religious duty to seek out and slay first that one of the Giaours (the infidels) whom he loved most, viz., his own partner. He therefore urged him to leave the village before the appointed day. And I myself have seen Turks tend and feed wounded and homeless Armenians whom they themselves had attacked and rendered homeless in a massacre. In some cases, indeed, Moslems (Circassians, Kurds, Turks, or others) have condemned the massacres and refused to participate in them; individual Moslems have occasionally concealed Armenians and have sometimes lost their own lives to protect them. And although on the whole the Moslem population has been the willing tool of the government in carrying out its massacre orders, the motive with individuals is not necessarily personal hatred. It is true that personal scores may be paid during a massacre; but personal rancour is not the prime motive nor is it the ultimate cause. The real cause is political and economical. Wherever the ruling race found itself losing ground through the superior industrial and commercial activity of the subject race, the appeal was made to arms to restore the balance. By arms the country was originally conquered: by arms it must be held. Such was the Turk's theory of government. And some plausible pretext for massacre was always found-murder, intrigue, rebellion-usually utterly groundless, sometimes well founded; but even when well founded never such as would (according to the standards of western democracy)

justify massacre, pillage and rape, but would at most justify the punishment of the guilty parties only. Those who plan the massacres are glad of a pretext. The more plausible the pretext the better, if it should ever be necessary to explain the massacres to an inquisitive foreigner. But pretext or no pretext, Abdul Hamid's massacres occurred, for he adopted the theory that Turkish supremacy is to be preserved by the sword, just as it was originally established by the sword. Hateful as the idea of massacre is, we must remember that Catholics and Protestants reciprocally tortured and massacred each other in days gone by in la belle France and in Merrie England. Race riots and negro-lynchings occasionally occur even yet in the United States. And pogroms of Jews were frequent in Rumania, Poland and Russia before the war, and perhaps are not over yet. These facts, however, can not serve as justification or palliation of massacre, but only to remind one that the Turks who participate in massacres are not a different kind of being from the West European; and to emphasize the fact that as in England, France, Italy and the States, that method of settling racial problems or maintaining the supremacy of the dominant race has been outgrown, there is no inherent reason why the Turk also could not abandon massacre as a method of government, and seek to maintain his supremacy as the dominant race in the Turkey of the future by meeting the Armenian, the Greek and the Jew on his own ground of commercial, educational and industrial development.

These, then, are two of the disastrous results of the policy of accepting military service from Moslems only. First, it laid upon the Moslem races, and particularly upon the Ottoman Turk, an intolerable burden of military service and kept him out of commerce and industry. Second, it made it necessary for the Turk to maintain his supremacy in his own country by the cruel terror of the sword, since he was hopelessly behind in all the arts of peace. It had a third disastrous consequence, in that it kept the different races of the country in separate camps, and prevented the growth of a spirit of loyalty to the state. It would be difficult enough to maintain one's loyalty towards an army and a governmental hierarchy which con

tains no representative of your own race, or to follow with great interest its exploits. But when you know that that same army may be turned against you at the bidding of that government in case you give any indication of disaffection; and that the reason why you have no representative in the army is that it may be a more efficient instrument for quelling your disaffection, then loyalty to that army or that government becomes impossible. If Abdul Hamid could complain of the lack of loyalty of his subjects, he had not only his personal tyranny to blame, but also that system of the exclusive military domination of one race which he inherited from his predecessors.

There have, indeed, been those who sought to solve the problem raised by the presence of disaffected elements in the Empire by the rooting out of the disaffected elements-such was evidently the policy of Talaat and Enver during the war. Not only was the presence of disaffected elements in the country a menace to the country in case of foreign wars, and especially when invasion was threatened, but the very presence of these elements supplied to the European powers a pretext for interference in Turkey's internal affairs. Now the obvious method of getting rid of disaffection is to remove the cause. But this method the Turkish government was not prepared to adopt; for it was not prepared to grant equality of rights to subjected races. Of late years the Armenian demand for political equality has been the most persistent, just as the Irish problem has been the most persistent and vexatious for Britain, and the policy of Talaat and Enver was to solve the Armenian problem by getting rid of the Armenians. There have been Turks who have, even since the Armistice and here in Constantinople, suggested that the early Ottoman Sultans made a mistake in that they did not root out the conquered peoples. Had the Conqueror, they say, destroyed the Greek population of Constantinople when he captured the city in 1453, there would have been no ground for Greek pretensions to-day in this region. Some of the Hebrew prophets in a similar vein condemned their ancestors for not having wiped out the Canaanites, root and branch, when they occupied Palestine. But that was 2500 years ago.

Statecraft has long ceased to approve such practices; and those Turks who entertain such ideas prove themselves to be centuries behind the march of progress. The hideous brutality and wrong of massacres is not questioned to-day by people who have any claim to be called civilized. Massacres may be explained, but they cannot be justified. And, whatever we may think of the morality of such a procedure, the extent to which it can be carried out is also limited by circumstances which the conqueror himself has no power to alter. Until the conquering race establishes itself in the territory it has occupied and takes upon itself the industry and commercial development of the country, it is necessary that these functions of the state should be carried on by the people already inhabiting the country. For the Turks to have wiped out the civilization of the conquered territory, to have exterminated the conquered races and thus destroyed their industry and commerce, would have left the conquerors under the obligation of building up from the foundation the industry and commerce of the land. So long as the conquering race devotes itself to military activity, i.e. to conquest and to domination by force of arms, it lacks the leisure necessary for commercial and industrial achievement which must be carried on by the subject races. Abdul Hamid recognized this fact, and the massacres he planned had as their motive not to exterminate the subject races but simply to keep them in check. They were the 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' of the Empire, and could not be removed without seriously impairing the economic life of the country. An incident will serve to illustrate this point. I was in Hadjin after the massacre of 1909, and heard from the local blacksmith, an Armenian, that villagers for miles around were coming to Hadjin to have their horses shod. When he asked one of them why he came so far with his horse and if they had no blacksmith in his own village, the answer was, 'Yes, we had a blacksmith, but he was an Armenian and we killed him.' There it is in a nutshell. Destroy the subject races and you utterly disorganize the industrial life of the Empire. The remark of the Turkish soldier which I have already quoted 'We Turks are the effendis. They work and we pay'-was a more profound

analysis of the political and economic situation than he himself realized except that the Turk has not constituted a leisured class in the Empire. He had his work to do arduous and very costly in energy and blood-viz., to protect the Empire from foreign invasion and cope at home with the rebellion which this system inevitably aroused. And so long as the militaristic conception of rule prevails the situation will continue to grow worse. The Talaat and Enver government continued this policy of domination by force with disastrous results. The Kemalist government is pursuing the same policy. But the present is an age of economic, not of military, domination, and no race can long survive the struggle for existence which has not in its own hands the conditions of progress-viz., education, commerce and industry. It is to these phases of life that Turkey must devote her chief efforts if she is to maintain a place among the democracies of the future.

If Moustafa Kemal were a true patriot, and not a mere adventurer, he would do what Premier Stamboulisky is doing in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian government is devoting its whole attention to the economic restoration and development of the country; not fuming about lost territory and brandishing a threatening sword in the face of the Entente, but soberly setting to work to make the best use of what is left. It were well for Turkey if her political leaders would take the same path-if they would abandon the idea that the Turkish race can maintain itself only by the sword and would seek prosperity in the arts of peace in commerce, industry and education.

Turkey can vindicate her lost honour not by continued bloodshed and oppression which have brought upon her her dishonour, but by a frank adoption of the principles of liberty, equality and justice for all Turkish subjects, regardless of race or religion, for on these principles only can true fraternity be established in the Turkey that is to be.

L. P. CHAMBERS.

Constantinople.