LAND AND WATER 
January 16, 1915, 
(2) Moral : that Is when the various parties to 
a combat are agreed upou certain tilings as liuman 
and to be tolerated upon either side. Thus it 
uiio-ht be thought inhuman to cut ofT water supply 
anS yet tolerable to cut off food. The test in this 
case is whether the enemy would be willing to 
apply the same test as you apply to him. The 
morals differ from religion in this, that they are 
matters of contract and of reason. 
(3) A greater military advantage to be ob- 
tained : as when you propose to bring in as your 
ally later on (or, what is the same thing, to prevent 
his fighting against you) someone whose supply of 
goods to the enemy in a staple matter of trade is 
vital to him ; or when you yourself need such 
supply and fear its being cut off from yourself, if 
you offend the neutral by closing the enemy's 
market, and when the advantage so aimed at is 
greater than the disadvantage immediately suffered. 
(4) A private interest : as when merchants 
becoming wealthy by export to the enemy, dhect or 
indirect, prefer their advantage to that of the 
commonwealth and have power over the Government 
to make their advantage prevail — and this last 
cause may operate in many ways and in the most 
roundabout fashion — through shipowners as much as 
by merchants — through men who fear any general 
diminution of trade throughout the Avorld as 
ultimately certain to react upon trade they do them- 
selves — through financiers who may pretend, or, 
if they are sufficiently stupid, believe that the 
counters with which they deal and the lubrication 
of exchange are equivalent to wealth itself, but who 
most commonly have no object but their personal 
enrichment, benig men without national affections, 
and at large between all combatant parties. 
Unless one of these four causes can be proved, 
and one of the first three (\Nhich alone are reputable) 
maintained, there can be no excuse for weakening 
in time of war the military action of the nation by 
rendering imperfect and impotent what might be a 
complete and potent military process. 
It is incumbent upon those who prefer to leave 
the blockade of Germany imperfect to explain which 
of these causes they invoke for their action, and to 
make it quite clear that they have a better reason 
for leaving that blockade incomplete than they 
would have for making it perfect. 
THE BATTLE IN THE CAUCASUS. 
THE Russian victory in the Caucasus or, as 
it probably will come to be called, the 
Battle of Sarikamish, is an event of im- 
portance not so much from the numbers 
engaged as from the lessons it teaches 
upon the German direction of the Turkish Army 
at this moment and from its probable political 
effect. 
It has been suggested that the action will pro- 
bably bear the name of the " Third Battle of Arda- 
ghan " because some part of the extended action 
was fought in front of that town while, in the same 
neighbourhood, two other conspicuous Russian 
victories have taken place ; one in 1829, the other 
during the last Russo-Turkish War in 1877 during 
the Russian advance on Kars. But the centre of 
the action, the place where far the heaviest shock 
of troops took place, appears to have been near 
the railhead of the Kars Railway, within a few 
miles of the frontier, at the road junction of Sari- 
kamish. And the telegrams that have hitherto 
reached us already call the battle by the name of 
this place. 
In order to understand what has happened 
and the significance it has in relation to the Ger- 
man direction of Turkish military effort we must 
first appreciate the nature of that frontier and the 
proportion of the forces involved. 
Take an oblong (see plan at top of next 
page) bounded on the north by the 45th 
Parallel and on the south by 38th Parallel, 
between Longitude 35 East and Longitude 49 East. 
That IS, an oblong more than 450 but less than 
oOO miles across and about 700 miles long. Within 
such an oblong all the Caucasian territory where 
the Christian has pressed back the Turk during 
the last hundred years is comprised. 
The broad isthmus between the Black Sea and 
the Caspian is the scene, a tr.^ of land nowhere 
less than 300 odd miles across and upon the aver- 
age more like 400. The boundary that looks as 
though It wore fixed by nature between the one 
Power and the other is the great Cavicasian range 
of mountains, the ridge of which runs along ttie 
line A-B. It is one of the most complete natural 
barriers in the world, surpassing in this character 
the Pyrenees, and rivalling the mountains that 
bound India upon the north. Its highest summits 
touch from 15,000 to 18,000 feet, its principal 
passes do not sink much below 8,000 and 9,000 ; no 
railway has yet been driven across it, though, as 
in the case of the Eastern Pyrenees, the system 
manages to squeeze round at an extreme end be- 
tween the mountains and the Caspian Sea. Only 
two main roads have been engineered from north 
to south through all the 500 miles of its extent. But 
this great chain, though it forms so complete a 
natural bari-ier, does not divide two civilisations ;_ 
for religion, which is the determinant of culture, 
has produced for centuries Mahommedanism north 
of the chain, as it has preserved great bodies of 
Christendom, Uniate and Orthodox, to the south 
of it. It is this Christian majority to the south in 
what is called Georgia, and beyond this again in 
the mountains of Armenia, to which the Russian, 
effort has perpetually been extended. And its 
last limit before the present conflict (a limit fixed 
in 1878 after the war of 1877 by the Treaty of 
Berlin) was thai marked upon the sketch by the 
dotted line, C-D, about half of which belongs to the 
frontier of the Turkish Empire, and half to that 
(now a nominal one) of Persia against Russia. This 
frontier upon its Persian side is largely natural, 
following the course of the Araxes River, as far 
as the nearly isolated mountain mass of Ararat, 
which stands where Persia, Asiatic Turkey, and 
the Russian Empire meet, but eastward of this 
mass of xVrarat and on to the Black Sea the frontier 
follows no natural features, it cuts across high' 
ridge and deep ravine indifferently, and may be 
neglected in any strategic plan. The great fea- 
tures of the district between the Caucasus and 
Asiatic Turkey, for the purposes of military hii=- 
tory, are: — ■ 
