CHAPTER XII 

 THE PROBLEM OF TURKEY 



TURNING from our survey of the past, let us apply to 

 modern problems the lessons learned from a study of 

 man's relation to his physical environment. In the Great 

 War we recognize Germany and Turkey as the two main types 

 that we were opposing. Austria and Bulgaria are intermediate 

 between the others, and therefore need not claim our attention. 

 Both Turkey and Germany furnish striking examples of the results 

 which arise when physical evolution proceeds to its logical ends 

 without being duly guided and moulded by the spiritual factor 

 of altruism. Germany illustrates what happens under the most 

 favorable physical environment; Turkey what happens in a much 

 less favorable, but not the worst environment. 



Let us begin with Turkey. If I were to choose a text for this 

 chapter, it would be from Eliot's "Turkey in Europe," that best 

 of books on the Turk: "The crimes with which the Turks are 

 frequently reproached, such as treachery, fratricide, and whole- 

 sale cruelty, are characteristic not of them, but of the lands which 

 they invaded." We all know those crimes. Our hearts have bled 

 for the hundreds of thousands of massacred Armenians, and for 

 the Syrians suffering torture and starvation. Our purses have 

 been opened that we may bind up a few of the wounds that the 

 Turk, backed by the German, has inflicted on his miserable Chris- 

 tian fellow subjects, or perhaps I should say slaves. With these 

 dire facts in mind it is hard to judge fairly. Yet if we do not 

 judge fairly we run the risk of falling into the very errors for 

 which we fought the old regime in Germany. So let us patiently 



