Taking Thought for the Morrow
(From London Present Truth) In a world which has learned to respect nothing so much as military strength, defeated Turkey can not hope for much tenderness. Already it is beginning to dawn upon the political schemers that they could make good use of certain portions of the Turkish dominions in Asia. And if they should decide to enrich themselves in those quarters, they will know how to lay upon the victim all the blame for the painful necessity they feel themselves under. Says the Nation: “If Turkey insisted on being yet more decisively crushed, and antagonizes the powers which have given her good and friendly advice, she will discover that while a process of amputation has relieved her of her European problems, the question of Asia has suddenly become acute. Since first the war began, the more conservative currents in diplomacy have striven to avoid that complication. But it presses with increasing urgency. The German ambassador, tho he used the language of friendship for Turkey, has very emphatically staked out a claim in Anatolia and uttered the ‘Noli-me-tangere,’ which warns the rest of the world that Asia Minor is for Germany ‘a place in the sun.’ In France, the financial group which ‘studies’ colonial problems with a rather naive attempt to imitate the procedure of a learned society, has revived the traditional French claim to Syria. Russia long ago claimed the Armenian provinces as in some sense her political sphere of interests, and she has been able to reserve them hitherto by frustrating every proposal to build railways in them or through them. We suppose that if any formal partition of Asiatic Turkey into zones of interest or influence were to take place, Mesopotamia and Arabia would fall to this country.”