ing to the same cause, has, I regret to say, been produced upon my own countrymen. A gradual assimilation has been for some time in progress in the East with the habits and customs of the rest of Europe. We are abandoning our distinctive costume, and adapting ourselves to a Western mode of life in many ways. We are becoming lax in the observances of our religion; and it is now the fashion for our women to get their high-heeled boots and bonnets from Paris, and for our youths of good family to go to that city of pleasure, or to one of the large capitals of Europe, for their education. Here they adopt all the vices of AntiChristendom, for the attractions of a civilization based upon enlightened selfishness are overpoweringly seductive, and they return without religion of any sortshallow, shallow, sceptical, egotistical, and thoroughly demoralized. It is next to impossible for a Moslem youth, as I myself experienced, to come. out of that fire uncontaminated. His religion fits him to live with simple and primitive races, and even to acquire a moral control over them; but he is fascinated and overpowered by the mighty influence of the glamour of the West. He returns to Turkey with his principles thoroughly undermined, and, if he has sufficient ability, adds one to the number of those who misgovern it.

"The two dominant vices which characterize Anti-Christendom are cupidity and hypocrisy. That which chiefly revolts the Turk in this disguised attack upon the morals of his people, no less than upon the very existence of his empire, is, that it should be made under the pretext of morality, and behind the flimsy veil of humanitarianism. It is in the nature of the religious idea that just in proportion as it was originally penetrated with a divine truth, which has become VOL. 21-NO. 1046

perverted, does it engender hypocrisy. This was so true of Judaism, that when the founder of Christianity came, though Himself a Jew, He scorchingly denounced the class which most loudly professed the religion which they profaned. But the Phariseeism which has made war upon Turkey is far more intense in degree than that which He attacked, for the religion which it profanes contains the most divine truth which the world ever received. Mahomet divided the nether world into seven hells, and in the lowest he placed the hypocrites of all religions. I have now carefully examined into all religions, but as none of them demanded so high a standard from its followers as Christianity, there has not been any development of hypocrisy out of them at all corresponding to that which is peculiar to Anti-Christianity. For that reason I am constrained to think that its contributions to the region assigned to hypocrites by the prophet will be out of all proportion to the hypocrites of other religions.

'In illustration of this, see how the principles of morality and justice are at this moment being hypocritically outraged in Albania, where, on the moral ground that a nationality has an inherent right to the property of its neighbor, if it can make a claim of similarity of race, a southern district of the country is to be forcibly given to Greece; while, in violation of the same principle, a northern district is to be taken from the Albanian nationality, to which by right of race it belongs, and violently and against the will of the people, who are in no way consulted as to their fate, is to be handed over for an annexation to the Montenegrins - a race whom the population to be annexed traditionally hate and detest.

'When Anti-Christendom nations, sitting in solemn congress, can be

guilty of such prostitution of the most sacred principles in the name of morality, and construct an international code of ethics to be applicable to Turkey alone, which they would one and all refuse to admit or be controlled by themselves when we know that the internal corruption, the administrative abuses, and the oppressive mis-government of the Power (Russia) which has just made war against us in the name of humanity, have driven the population to despair, and the authorities to the most cruel excesses in order to repress them and when, in the face of all this most transparent humbug, these Anti-Christian nations arrogate to themselves, on the ground of their superior civilization and morality, the right to impose reform upon Turkey, - we neither admit their pretensions, covet their civilization, believe in their good faith, nor respect their morality.

"Thus it is that, from first to last, the woes of Turkey have been due to its contact with Anti-Christendom. The race is now paying the penalty for that lust of dominion and power which tempted them in the first instance to cross the Bosphorus. From the day on which the tree of empire was planted in Europe, the canker, in the shape of the opposing religion, began to gnaw at its roots. When the Christians within had thoroughly eaten out its vitals, they called on the Christians without for assistance; and it is morally impossible that the decayed trunk can much longer withstand their combined efforts. But as I commenced by saying, had the invading Moslems in the first instance converted the entire population to their creed, Turkey might have even now withstood the assaults of "progress." Nay, more, it is not impossible that her victorious armies might have overrun Europe, and that the faith of Islam might have extended over the whole of what is now

termed the civilized world. I have often thought how much happier it would have been for Europe, and unquestionably for the rest of the world, had such been the case. That wars and national antagonisms would have continued is doubtless true; but we should have been saved the violent political and social changes which have resulted from steam and electricity, and have continued to live the simple and primitive life which satisfied the aspirations of our ancestors, and in which they found contentment and happiness, while millions of barbarians would to this day have remained in ignorance of the gigantic vices peculiar to Anti-Christian civilization. The West would then have been spared the terrible consequences which are even now impending, as the inevitable result of an intellectual progress to which there has been no corresponding moral advance. The persistent violation for eighteen centuries of the great altruistic law propounded and enjoined by the great founder of the Christian religion must inevitably produce a corresponding catastrophe; and the day is not far distant when modern civilization will find that in its great scientific discoveries and inventions, devised for the purpose of ministering to its own extravagant necessities, it has forged the weapons by which it will itself be destroyed. No better evidence of the truth of this can be found than in the fact that Anti-Christendom alone is menaced with the danger of a great class revolution; already in every socalled Christian country we hear the mutterings of the coming storm, when labor and capital will find themselves arrayed against each other when rich and poor will meet in deadly antagonism, and the spoilers and the spoiled solve, by means of the most recently invented artillery, the economic problems of modern "progress."

'It is a remarkable fact, that this struggle between rich and poor is specially reserved for those whose religion inculcates upon them, as the highest law the love of their neighbor and most strongly denounces the love of money. No country which does not bear the name of Christian is thus threatened. Even in Turkey, in spite of its bad government and the many Christians who live in it, socialism, communism, nihilism, internationalism, and all kindred forms. of class revolution, are unknown, for the simple reason that Turkey has so far, at least, successfully resisted the influence of "Anti-Christian civilization."

'In the degree in which the state depends for its political, commercial, and social well-being and prosperity, not upon a moral but a mechanical basis, is its foundation perilous. When the lifeblood of a nation is its wealth, and the existence of that wealth depends upon the regularity with which railroads and telegraphs perform their functions, it is in the power of a few skilled artisans, by means of a combined operation, to strangle it. Only the other day the engineers and firemen of a few railroads in the United States struck for a week; nearly a thousand men were killed and wounded before the trains could be set running again; millions of dollars' worth of property was destroyed. The contagion spread to the mines and factories, and had the movement been more skillfully organized, the whole country would have been in revolution, and it is impossible to tell what the results might have been. Combinations among the working classes are now rendered practicable by rail and wire, which formerly were impossible; and the facilities which exist for secret conspiracy have turned Europe into a slumbering volcano, an erup

tion of which is rapidly approaching. "Thus it is that the laws of retribution run their course, and that the injuries that Anti-Christendom has inflicted upon the more primitive and simple races of the world, which under the pretext of civilizing them it has exploited to its own profit, will be amply avenged. Believe me, my dear friend, that it is under no vindictive impulse or spirit of religious intolerance that I write thus; on the contrary, though I consider Mussulmans generally to be far more religious than Christians, inasmuch as they practise more conscientiously the teaching of their prophet, I feel that teaching from an ethical point of view to be infinitely inferior to that of Christ. I have written, therefore, without prejudice, in this attempt philosophically to analyze the nature and causes of the collision which has at last culminated between the East and West, between so-called Christendom and Islam. And I should only be too thankful if it could be proved to me that I had done the form of religion you profess, or the nation to which you belong, an injustice. I am far from wishing to insinuate that among Christians, even as Christianity is at present professed and practised, there are not as good men as among nations called heathen and barbarous. I am even prepared to admit there are better-for some struggle to practise the higher virtues of Christianity, not unsuccessfully, considering the manner in which these are conventionally travestied; while others, who reject the popular theology altogether, have risen higher than ordinary modern Christian practice by force of reaction against the hypocrisy and shams by which they are surrounded- but these are in a feeble minority, and unable to affect the popular standard. Such men existed among the Jews at the time of Christ,

but they did not prevent Him from denouncing the moral iniquities of His day, or the Church which countenanced them. At the same time, I must remind you that I shrank from the task which you imposed upon me, and only consented at last to undertake it on your repeated assurances that by some, at all events, of your countrymen, the spirit by which I have been animated in writing thus frankly will not be misconceived.'

friendship of England, which decades of unprogressive Conservatism and ineffective misrule leave unimpaired, at once changes to an attitude of distrust and overt hostility.

The radically altered attitude of England toward Turkey synchronized with the social and political upheaval which accompanied the first attempt toward a democratic reform of the whole Turkish policy under the inspiration and guidance of the much criticized party of Union and Progress.

November]

ISLAM AND THE ENTENTE

BY H. M. HOWSIN

(Oriental Editor)

[This brings the preceding article
up to date.]

It is an ominous fact that, wherever the British influence and interest is paramount in the processes of political readjustment, the result has been national disintegration, forcible annexation, and the substitution of new tyrannies rather than the establishing of the principle of self-determination and freedom for weak and oppressed nationalities to which the British government and the British people stand irrevocably committed. We cannot regard this policy as an unfortunate legacy of the war, nor as a temporary aberration of British democracy, since it was consistently and aggressively operative through British Liberal diplomacy in the fateful years preceding the war, with the betrayal of Persia as the conspicuous example and the abandonment of Tripoli to the Italian invader as hardly less infamous. Neither can it be mere coincidence that whenever the spirit of political reformation on democratic lines begins seriously to animate an Eastern, particularly a Mohammedan power, the traditional

both in point of policy and personnel the party inevitably labored under grievous handicaps and limitations, it nevertheless evinced an honesty of purpose and determination in the face of almost insuperable difficulties. It frankly appealed to Great Britain as the traditional ally of Turkey and friend of freedom for support and guidance; it was met by open animosity and such obstructive tactics on the part of British statesmen as were successfully calculated to destroy all the stable elements of reform, and leave it a prey to anarchical dissolution. At the same time the ignorance and deliberate isolation of the British Consulate from Turkish interests, aspirations, and affairs, drove Turkey to accept the overture of the more intelligent and sympathetic Germany.

ity could occupy the highest official posts. They showed an unparalleled eagerness for education. Hundreds of schools were established during the constitutional régime. A remarkable free press sprang up, with fearless writers denouncing tyranny and injustice, whether from within their country or without' (The Strangling of Persia, by Schuster).

The teachings of Christianity were arousing great interest and receiving deep respect, and the people in their passion for progress were preparing for a general acceptance of Western ethical codes. The eyes of all Islam were on Persia; her end was instructive. England and Russia made the famous. Anglo-Russian-Persian agreement 'to respect the integrity of Persia.' Each party pledged itself not to seek for themselves or their subjects any concessions of a political or commercial character, and drew up various other clauses designed 'to ensure forever the independence of Persia.' To give full effect to these noble sentiments, Russia, secretly encouraged by Germany, plunged 18,000 troops into the friendly Persian country, and did not desist from wholesale massacre accompanied by the most revolting tortures until every vestige of the new national life. had been wiped out. England, under the guidance of Sir Edward Grey an advanced Liberal with the ink hardly dry on the Treaty which pledged her to protect Persia - looked on, but retained her sphere of influence, with the excuse of her Foreign Minister, not reassuring to her Moslem subjects that she was not prepared to resist or even threaten Russia, but preferred to betray both her honor and her ancient ally to her traditional

enemy.

In the case of Tripoli, by the agreement made with the Sultan, Turkey was entitled to the use of the Egyptian

army and could increase it to the requirements of the moment in defence of her own territories. When the question became acute and the Egyptian troops were showing signs of mutiny in their anxiety to resist the Italian invasion, England, desirous to increase her friendship with Italy, and, if possible, weaken the Triple Alliance, sent Lord Kitchener to Egypt to strengthen the British occupation, and to prevent any Egyptian succor being given to the Sultan.

Thus again the British obligations with a Mohammedan power were thrust aside for the political convenience of the moment.

It was thus inevitable that the persuasion that Christian powers had a concerted plot to destroy every Mohammedan nation, which events before the war had more than suggested to Islam, should become an irradicable conviction in the light of the peace terms now forced on Turkey.

On January 5, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George definitely stated that Great Britain was not fighting 'to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race.' Three days later President Wilson stipulated, with the concurrence of Great Britain, 'that the Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured of secure sovereignty, but that other nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured of security of life and autonomous development.' At the time these pledges were given, Great Britain and indirectly all the Allies were depending on the continued support of Mohammedan troops. To-day, by the terms of the Peace Treaty, the Caliph of Islam is a prisoner in Constantinople; the Turkish army is disarmed; the Dardanelles are controlled by British warships. Greece, supported by