Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but in order to understand at
all adequately the case against Turkey as a ruler and controller of
subject peoples, it is necessary to go, though briefly, into her
blood-stained genealogy. There is no need to enter into ethnological
discussions as to earlier history, or define the difference between the
Osmanli Turks and those who were spread over Asia Minor before the
advent of the Osmanlis from the East. But it was the Osmanlis who were
the cancerous and devouring nation, and it is they who to-day rule over
a vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples alien to them by
religion and blood and all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until
Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a
champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and
literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare
with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914,
there was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and
cross-bones, and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land
and on sea, and Germany showed herself an anachronism worthy to impale
her arms on the shield of the most execrable domination that has ever
oppressed the world since the time when the Huns under Attila raged like
a forest fire across the cultivated fields of European civilisation.
To-day, in the name of Kultur, a similar invasion has broken on shores
that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it has found its most
valuable victim and ally in the Power that adopted the same methods of
absorption and extermination centuries before the Hohenzollerns ever
started on their career of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and
perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our astonishing diplomacy in
Constantinople that Turkey, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in
her lot with the Power that by instinct and tradition most resembled
her. Spiritual blood, no less than physical blood, is thicker than