In compiling the following pages I have had access to certain sources of official information, the nature of which I am not at liberty to specify further. I have used these freely in such chapters of this book as deal with recent and contemporary events in Turkey or in Germany in connection with Turkey: the chapter, for instance, entitled 'Deutschland über Allah,' is based very largely on such documents. I have tried to be discriminating in their use, and have not, as far as I am aware, stated a

The maker of phrases plies a dangerous trade. Very often his phrase is applicable for the moment and for the situation in view of which he coined it, but his coin has only a temporary validity: it is good for a month or for a year, or for whatever period during which the crisis lasts, and after that it lapses again into a mere token, a thing without value and without meaning. But the phrase cannot, as in the case of a monetary coinage, at once be recalled, for it has gone broadcast over the land

In the year 1908 a military group in Constantinople, styling itself the 'Young Turk' party, seized and deposed Abdul Hamid, and shut him up at Salonika, there to spend the remainder of his infamous days. They put forth a Liberal programme of reformation, one that earned them at the moment the sympathy of civilised Europe (including Germany), and the Balance of Power very mistakenly and prematurely heaved a sigh of relief. For upwards of a century it had maintained in Constantinople the corrupt a

We have traced in brief the backward progress of Ottoman domination, and have seen how, from the rough and ready methods of a military barbarism, the Turks evolved a more emphatic and a more highly organised negation of all those principles which we may sum up under the general term of civilisation. The comparatively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier Sultans was improved upon by Abdul Hamid, who struck out the swifter and superior methods of m

It is impossible to leave this heart-rending tale of the sufferings of the Armenian people under the Turks without some account of that devoted band of American missionaries who, with a heroism unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, so eagerly sacrificed themselves to the ravages of pestilence and starvation in order to alleviate the horrors that descended on the people to whom they had been sent. Often they were forcibly driven from the care of their flocks, often in the extermination of their fl

It was commonly said at the beginning of this war that, whatever Germany's military resources might be, she was hopelessly and childishly lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowledge of psychology, from which all success in diplomacy is distilled. As instances of this grave defect, people adduced the fact that, apparently, she had not anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced to be not a crime me

Let us commit the crime of lèse-majesté , and assume (though the Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in anticipation of the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature, for it shows what Europe w

It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the Allies' aims as regards Turkey to free from her barbarous control the subject peoples dwelling within her borders, for Turkey herself has to be delivered from a domination not less barbaric than her own, which, if allowed to continue, would soon again be a menace to the peace of the world. We have seen in a previous chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace envelops her, and we now have to consider how