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HE Harris Foundation Lectures at the
University of Chicago have been made
possible through the generosity of the heirs of
Norman Wait Harris and Emma Gale Harris,
who donated to the University a fund to be
known as “The Norman Wait Harris Memo-
rial Foundation” on January 27, 1923. The
letter of gift contains the following statement:
It is apparent that a knowledge of world-affairs was
never of more importance to Americans than today. The
spirit of distrust which pervades the Old World is not
without its effect upon our own country. How to combat
this disintegrating tendency is a problem worthy of the
most serious thought. Perhaps one of the best methods
is the promotion of a better understanding of other nations
through wisely directed educational effort.

The purpose of the foundation shall be the promotion
of a better understanding on the part of American citizens
of the other peoples of the world, thus establishing a basis
for improved international relations and a more enlight-
ened world-order. The aim shall always be to give accu-
rate information, not to propagate opinion.

In fulfilment of this object, the First Institute
was held at the University of Chicago in the
summer of 1924. This series of volumes will
include the lectures, delivered by foreign
scholars at these Institutes, in essentially their
original form.

ia iii inteTHE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENTf
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

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THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY
SHANGHAITHE OCCIDENT
AND THE ORIENT

LECTURES ON THE HARRIS
FOUNDATION, 1924

By
VALENTINE CHIROL

Sometime Director of the Foreign Department of the Times

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO - ILLINOIS

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All Rights Reserved

Published November 1924
Second Impression August 1925

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Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Tee ee ee eeeFOREWORD

My choice of the subject with which I have
attempted to deal in these lectures was largely
prompted by the recollection of a conversation
during the Paris Peace Conference with one of the
members of the American delegation. Hopes were
still then entertained that the United States would
be willing to accept a mandate for Armenia or
Syria, but though my friend was warmly in favor
of the mandatory system contemplated by the
Covenant of the League of Nations, and fully
realized the unique value of American co-operation
in carrying it into effect in those regions where
alone of all the great Powers the United States
could not be suspected of any selfish ambitions,
he was frankly skeptical as to the likelihood of
his country’s assuming such novel and heavy re-
sponsibilities. “The Orient,” he said, “is too
far away from us geographically and histort-
cally.” The event bore out his prognostication,
and one can quite well understand the reasons
which induced the United States to refrain in
that instance from any direct intervention in the
Orient.

{ vii }FOREWORD

But there is a larger aspect of the relations
between the Occident and the Orient than the
American people were perhaps then inclined to
take into account. Time and space are being
annihilated today by the conquests of science,
and all the peoples of the world are being brought
into increasingly close contact with one another
under the pressure of material and moral forces of
which the irresistible momentum is still only
imperfectly apprehended. They had scarcely be-
gun to emerge when nearly a half-century ago
I first “heard the East a-calling.” I have been
a frequent traveler since then over the greater
part of the Orient, in the Mohammedan lands of
Turkey and Egypt and Persia, in that great Indian
subcontinent under British rule which contains
alone nearly a fifth of the human race, and in
China and Japan, the last countries of Asia to have
been forcibly dragged out of their ancient isolation
by the masterful impact of the Occident, and I
have had somewhat exceptional opportunities of
watching at close quarters the changes which have
taken place there within the compass of my own
lifetime. We may call these changes the reawak-
ening or the revolt of the Orient, but whatever we
may call them, they have already profoundly
transformed the former relationships between the

{| viii }FOREWORD

Occident and the Orient based upon the claim of
Occidental civilization to inherent and indefeasible
superiority over the civilizations of the Orient, and
they already threaten to raise a still more danger-
ous issue of racial conflict between the white man
and the colored peoples who constitute the vast
majority of mankind.

It is from this broader angle of vision that [|
have ventured now to approach a question to
which, in so far as it may involve the future of a
civilization common both to America and to
Europe, the American people cannot remain
wholly indifferent, however remote from them its
origins may seem to be “geographically and
historically.”

VALENTINE CHIROL

CHICAGO

July, 1924

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PAGE

[ee UHEIRVANCIENT) DATILEGROUND)) ee 3
II. THe Passinc of THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE . . . 33
Me THE Pecucrar CAse On EGYPT.) 0 95) Une
IV. Tue Great British ExpeERIMENTIN INDIA . . 109
V. PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES .. . . « 149

VI. Tue New Facror or BOLSHEVISM AND SOME
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS) » 2 |) 2) =) Came

[NDEXS oo eo ee gh ee ley

[ xi]1
THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUNDI

THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

When I had the great honor of being invited
by the President of the University of Chicago
to come over and address this Institute, I
selected as my subject the very large question of
the “Relation between the Occident and the
Orient” for two reasons which I trust you may
be willing to regard as adequate. In the first
place, I wanted to choose a subject on which
I might reasonably hope to speak usefully as it
is one in which I have taken a deep interest ever
since I first “heard the East a-calling” nearly
fifty years ago, and I have been granted a fairly
long lifetime to observe the momentous changes
in the Orient which have made havoc of all our
once comfortable generalizations about an un-
changing East. In the second place, the subject
seemed to me to come well within the scope of
the Norman Wait Harris Foundation as it deals
with one of the greatest international problems
of our time—a problem of which, absorbed as
the Occident is today in probing the deep wounds

[3]i

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

of the Great War and groping after a cure for
them, many are inclined to ignore or to underrate
the magnitude, though it may affect the future
of the whole human race.

The discords and the conflicts within the
Occident are many and grievous, but the nations
that they divide all belong, broadly speaking, to
the same type of civilization; and in the fact that
they are all partners in that civilization I see
a sure ground for hoping and believing that
those discords and conflicts will be assuaged and will
finally disappear under the healing influence of
time and by the development of new processes of
international agreement. Between the Occident
and the Orient, on the other hand, there is no
such bond of a common civilization. On the
contrary, the discords and conflicts which divide
them arise out of the clash of different, and in
many respects mutually antagonistic, civilizations,
and the phase upon which they are now entering
may be roughly described as a general movement
of revolt throughout the Orient against the ascend-
ancy of the Occident on the plea either that it has
learned all that the Occident can teach it, or
that all the lessons of the Occident are a snare
and a delusion. The real significance, I think,
of this revolt is that behind it there is the stirring

[4]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

of ancient world-forces long dormant in the Orient
but reawakening once more under the masterful
impact of our modern Western civilization. That
reawakening assumes many different and some-
times conflicting shapes, for though we may regard
the Orient as a whole and the Occident as a whole
in so far as they stand for distinct types of civiliza-
tion, the Orient is not one nor is the Occident.

Contact between individual nations of the
Occident and individual nations of the Orient
arose centuries ago under the pressure of many
different forces and followed in each case different
lines of development with results which are even
today vitally different, though revolt against the
Occident may be their greatest common denomi-
nator. As I cannot possibly cover the whole of so
large a field, I have selected for special and more
detailed treatment the relations of the Occident
with the three peoples of the Orient—Arabs,
Turks, and Indians—whose history has been
most closely interlocked for centuries back with
that of the Occident.

The present has its roots in the past and, in
the Orient especially, in a very remote past, and
it is from no impertinent desire to inflict a super-
fluous course of history upon you that I shall
ask you to explore with me in the first place the

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

origin of the great world-forces which have dug
the deepest lines of cleavage between the Occident
and the Orient. For they are in a great measure
the same forces with which the Orient confronts
the Occident today.

We are all of us more or less familiar from our
school days with the earliest conflicts on record
between the Occident and the Orient when the
ancient Greeks repelled the Persian hordes, and
the Roman Caesars in their turn held the gorgeous
Fast in fee. But not until the Greek and Roman
civilization had broadened out into the larger civili-
zation, of which Christianity laid the foundations,
was the conflict between the Occident and the
Orient renewed in a shape which has endured to
our own days.

In the Occident the vital force of religion is so
largely tempered by the modern spirit of tolerance,
often indeed stretched to indifference, that we
seldom realize that in most parts of the Orient
it is still a tremendously vital force, and that
none is more vital there than the great religion
which was born fourteen centuries ago in the
deserts of Arabia—the religion which we call
Mohammedanism, but which Mohammedans
themselves call Islam, or “surrender to the will

of God.”
[6]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

Unlike any other great world-religion, Islam
was born sword in hand, and its message was not,
like that of Christ, a message of peace, but one
of war. Twice it has threatened sword in hand
to overwhelm Europe. Today its sword has grown
rusty, but Islam still regards the non-Moham-
medan world as the world of war—the Dar-el-
Harb—which at the appointed time its sword,
resharpened by God’s will, shall so conquer that
the Dar-ul-Islam—the world of Islam—may at
last spread over the whole earth. There ts hardly
a city in the Orient, from the Atlantic shores of
Morocco to the wilds of Central Asia, where this
promise is not implicitly renewed when the
Muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, proclaiming,
from the top of the minaret, in the stillness of the
night and in the busy hours of the day, to some
250,000,000 of the human race that there is no
God but God, and that Mohammed is the prophet
of God.

What is the secret, what is the history of a
creed that has reacted so widely and so continu-
ously upon the relations of the Occident and the
Orient? Though the cradle of Islam was not far
distant from that of Judaism and of Christianity,
and traces of both can be detected in the teachings
of its founder, who even professed to revere

[7]THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Moses and Jesus as his own forerunners, it was
cast from the beginning in a very different mold.
It is, above all, an unbending creed; for it was
revealed, as all orthodox Mohammedans believe,
with absolute finality in the Koran, of which the
unalterable text was conveyed to the prophet
Mohammed in a series of divine revelations
through the angel Gabriel.

The sacred book is for all true believers the
basis of all spiritual, social, and political life;
for it regulates not only the religious beliefs and
practices of every good Mohammedan, but his
lawful relations with his neighbors and his
obligations toward the state which is in theory
made up of the whole community or brotherhood
of Mohammedans. But Mohammed himself was
illiterate, which in the East does not necessarily
mean unlearned, and as these successive revela-
tions, of which he dictated the exact tenor immedi-
ately after each one had been vouchsafed to him,
covered the twenty-three years of his career as a
prophet and conformed to the many important
changes which his views underwent during that
period, the Koran itself contains many variations
of doctrine, sometimes almost contradictory, yet
all equally immutable. So long as he lived,
his commanding personality sufficed to reconcile

[8]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

those discrepancies, but after his death it became
necessary to call in aid the evidence of those
who had been in closest contact with him, and were
therefore best qualified to interpret his intentions,
and their record of his sayings collected under
the name of Hadith, or Traditions, is second in
sanctity only to the Koran itself and forms with
the Koran the whole gospel of orthodox Islamic
truth.

Mohammed was undoubtedly a great spiritual
thinker whose soul revolted against the idol-
worship and the moral laxity which prevailed
among his fellow-tribesmen in Arabia. He made
a stern monotheism the foundation-stone of Islam,
but in devising a religious, social, and political
system which should rescue his people from their
loose heathenism, he had enough worldly wisdom
not to place any unbearable strain upon their
inherited habits of life and thought. There 1s
nothing in the Koran to show the chronological
order of the angel Gabriel’s revelations, but it is
easy to distinguish between those parts of it in
which Mohammed expresses himself as a religious
seer and those in which he adapts his visions of
divine truth to the practical requirements of a
human polity. Out of that conflict between ideals
and realities the Mohammedan theocratic state

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

emerged which combines in the same person both
temporal and spiritual authority.

The principle of theocracy has been for long
periods obscured in the vicissitudes of Islamic
history, but how vital it has always remained we
have seen once more within the last few years in
the sudden frenzy which carried away a large
section of the Mohammedan world in the so-called
‘“khalifate movement.” The khalifate itself dates
back to the death of the prophet. Provision had
to be made for the maintenance of the temporal
and spiritual authority vested in him during his
lifetime, and it was made in the institution of the
khalifate. The headship of Islam was to be
perpetuated in a Khalifa-Rassul-Allah, i.e., vice-
gerent of the prophet of God, otherwise called
Imam-el-Kebir, 1.e., the great guide, or Ameer-
el-Mouminin, the prince of the faithful. The
theocratic state which Mohammed had founded
was then still in its infancy and was centered in |
the Koreish tribe to which he belonged. Though
he passed away without actually designating
his successor, his father-in-law, Abu Bekr, was
immediately recognized as khalif, but he lived
for only two years, and grave dissensions soon
arose between those who held that the khalifate

[ 10]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

should be elective and those who favored the
principle of hereditary succession.

Concord was maintained under Abu Bekr’s
next two successors, though neither of them died
a natural death. Open strife broke out under the
fourth khalif, Ali, who was a son-in-law of the
prophet. He was murdered just thirty years
after the prophet’s death, and the khalifate
was transferred, by a combination of violence
and fraud, to the Ommayad dynasty at Damascus.
One immediate result was the great schism which
endures to the present day between the followers
of Ali, who call themselves Shiahs, and the Sunnis
who, being in a large majority, have claimed ever
since to represent Mohammedan orthodoxy.

The history of the khalifate has been a stormy
one ever since. It was at once repudiated by the
Shiahs; it lasted only a short time as a universal
khalifate even of Sunni Islam; it has often been
claimed simultaneously by different Mohammedan
sovereigns; it has sometimes dropped almost out
of sight in the clash of worldly ambitions; but
its principle as a divinely appointed institution
has never been openly denied by any Sunni
Mohammedan state until the Turkish Republic
proclaimed its abolition a few months ago.

[11]

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It was under the early khalifate that Islam
spread throughout the Orient with an astounding
rapidity which has no parallel in the history of
any other of the great world-religions. The small
band of semi-barbarous Arabs, who rushed forth
from their desert homelands in the first half of the
seventh century with the Koran in one hand and
the sword in the other, carried everything before
them in an irresistible tide of conquest, until
within less than a hundred years they had swept
eastward through Persia to Central Asia and to
the confines of India, and westward along the
north coast of Africa across to Spain and into the
very heart of France. The Occident at last cried
halt to them, but it was for a time desperately
hard pressed. Europe had not yet found herself
after the long succession of barbarian invasions,
which almost submerged the remnants of the
ancient civilization of Greece and Rome, and the
transfer of the seat of occidental empire to
Constantinople had shifted its center of stability to
the very outposts of the Orient. The Byzantine
Empire, however, still held the fort there, and
the Occident was not wholly defeated nor the
civilization for which it stood, for in the full
tide of victory the Arabs came into contact
with forms of civilization already decaying or still

[12]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

immature, but far more advanced than any that
Mohammed or his immediate followers ever
dreamed of.

The Arabs are a branch of the Semitic race;
they have fine natural gifts; they are intelligent;
they are full of imagination; they have a poetic
temperament which showed itself creative even
in pre-Mohammedan times, and they have a
natural aptitude for philosophic speculation. All
these qualities received a fresh stimulus when the
sword of Islam opened up to the Arabs vast
countries in which there lingered the afterglow
of Persian and Greek and Roman civilizations.
Even the rigidity of Islamic doctrine seemed for
a time to yield to new environments.

In Persia and in the adjacent lands of the Orient
within the orbit of Persian civilization the Shiah
heresy predominated and gave rise to a host of
other heresies deeply imbued with earlier, even
with Indian, forms of Asiatic mysticism. On the
eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean,
where Sunni orthodoxy prevailed, the Arabs
came under the influence of peoples who, however
degenerate, were the heirs of Greek and Roman
culture. They easily displaced Christianity, de-
based and torn by the bitter feuds of Arian and
Athanasian theologians, or petrified in the hermits’

{ 13 }

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENY

caves of the Syrian and Libyan hills. But the
opulence and refined luxury of such great cities
as Alexandria, Damascus, and Antioch appealed
to. the sensuous side of their natures, while their
speculative turn of mind led them to explore the
new avenues of philosophic thought which the
earlier translations of Greek authors into Syriac,
a language akin to Arabic, opened out before
them. Differences of creed and complexion were
attenuated by the intermarriage of the Arab
conquerors, relatively few in number, with women
of the subject races. A blend of alien elements
contributed to the growth of a brilliant and
cultured Mohammedan society at Damascus
under the Ommayad khalifate (661-750), and at
Baghdad under the more somber Abbaside khali-
fate (750-970), when the ruler seldom appeared
in public without the executioner at his side—just
as Flecker shows the khalif Haroun-el-Rashid
always attended by the sinister figure of Mansur
in his ““Golden Road to Samarkand.”
Bloodthirsty tyrants as were many of the
khalifs, they were also, like the “despots”’ of the
Italian Renaissance, generous patrons of art and
literature, and so keen was the response of the
Arab mind to the finest minds of Hellas that
in the reign of Haroun-el-Rashid’s successor,

[ 14 ]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

El-Mamun, Aristotle was translated into Arabic,
and,in the followingcentury, Ibn Sina, whom we call
Avicenna, though born in far-away Bokhara and
of Persian parentage, earned imperishable renown
for Arab science as a great teacher of medicine
as well as of philosophy.

It was not, however, in the lands belonging
geographically to the East that Islamic culture
reached its high-water mark, but in the farthest
Western lands swept by the tide of Arab victories
on the actual continent of Europe. With the
conquest of Spain in the middle of the eighth
century, the Arabs had become masters of so vast
an empire that unity neither of religious nor of
territorial rulership could be maintained. A
separate khalifate arose at Cordova, contemporary
with that of Baghdad, and it was there that
through the intermingling of Mohammedan and
Christian and Jewish elements the civilization
which: we call Saracenic not only yielded its
finest fruits but made an enduring and beneficent
mark on the Occident. For while the darkness
of the early Middle Ages was settling down upon
the Christian nations of Europe and they were
being taught to forget their great inheritance of
ancient classical learning, it was rescued from
oblivion by Arab writers of truly encyclopedic

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

learning—at Cordova and Granada, at Seville
and Toledo. Mohammedan princes ransacked
Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad for books both
old and new for their own libraries, and surrounded
themselves with philosophers and men of science.
Now and again the bigots checked the flow of
enlightenment, but it resumed its undaunted
course until it spread over every field of learning,
mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, geography,
history, metaphysics, and philosophy—above all,
philosophy.

It was, however, only after the khalifate of
Cordova had itself crumbled away that this
intellectual movement reached full maturity in
Abdul-Walid Ibn-Rushd, better known as Averroes,
who was born at Cordova in 1126, and enjoyed
for a long time the protection of the Almohad
princes. His influence cannot be measured
even by the immense volume of his writings,
which almost equals that of his chosen master,
Aristotle. Averroes was a keen student of medi-
cine and mathematics, but it was as an indomitable
seeker after philosophic truth that he found the
fullest scope for his genius. He claimed to be
little more than an interpreter of Aristotle, but
it is hardly too much to say that through him
Aristotle was reborn into the world. In his own

[ 16 }THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

lifetime Averroes had to suffer persecution at the
hands even of his earlier patrons who were driven
by Mohammedan orthodoxy and popular fanati-
cism to take alarm at his freedom of thought,
and soon after his death the narrow bigotry of
Mohammedan divines killed the new life which he
had sought to breathe into the dry bones of Islam.
The rare flower of Saracenic culture wilted even
before the revival in Spain of a Christianity
sometimes as fierce and militant as Islam itself
drove back the Mohammedan conquerors into
Northwest Africa. But through Averroes the
torch of learning, which he kept burning at a
critical period of human history, was handed on
to Western nations, who without his inspiration
might have suffered it to perish.

Trampled under foot during the final decay
of Mohammedan power in Spain, Averroism, as
the new school of liberal thought was deservedly
called after its founder, passed, largely through the
medium of its Jewish disciples whom Christian as
well as Mohammedan fanaticism drove out of
Spain, into the cities of southern France, and
thence on the one hand to the great Italian
University of Padua and on the other to Paris
and Oxford. It was as fiercely assailed by the
orthodox dogmatists of Western Christendom

[17]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

as it had been by the orthodox dogmatists of Islam.
But it found many courageous champions, and
not least among Englishmen.

Michael Scot journeyed to Toledo at the begin-
ning of the thirteenth century to study Arabic
and read the works of Averroes in the master’s
tongue, and it was he who first published an
English translation of Aristotle. Later on in the
same century Roger Bacon expounded Averroes
to an enthusiastic group of scholars at Oxford as
the greatest of Aristotelian commentators. Aver-
roism permeated the long period of travail through
which philosophy passed in Europe until the
Renaissance reopened access for European stu-
dents to the original works of the.Greek masters.
Today, when the Mohammedan world is passing
through another crisis, it is well to remember
that there was once at any rate a period of Moham-
medan enlightenment under Arab hegemony to
which the civilization of the Occident itself
owes a deep debt of gratitude.

Not even during that period, however, was
there any peace between the Occident and the
Orient. Christendom, long on the defensive
against Islam, was passing over to the offensive.
The same surge of religious revival that gradually
drove the Arabs out of Spain produced the

[18 ]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

Crusades, which, with their mingled record of
heroic other-worldliness and of a squalidly selfish
this-worldliness, constitute one of the most dra-
matic but also most disastrous episodes in the
history of the relations of the Occident and the
Orient. In so far as they were directed to the re-
covery of the Holy Land from the Mohammedan
infidels, they were essentially wars of religion in
which militant Christendom pitted itself against
militant Islam. Even the many instances of splen-
did chivalry, as frequent on the Mohammedan
as on the Christian side, only fitfully redeemed
them from the taint of savage fanaticism. From
this point of view they widened the gulf between
the Occident and the Orient. On the other
hand, when the personal ambitions of popes
and kings deflected the later Crusades from
their first pious purpose and the Latin Cru-
saders turned their arms quite as often against
the rival Christian power at Constantinople as
against the Mohammedan masters of Jerusalem,
they ended by weakening the Occident as a whole
just as it should have been closing up its ranks
to resist another and almost more formidable
onslaught from the Orient than that of the early
Arab conquerors. The Turks had begun to

sweep down upon Western Asia from their Central

[ 19 ]

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Asian homelands some time before the First
Crusade, but the great Seljukide Empire that they
built up on the ruins of the old Arab khalifates
had passed away before the last Crusade collapsed
ignominiously, not in the Holy Land, but on the
shores of the Black Sea, in a vain attempt to
arrest the menacing expansion of a much mightier
Turkish empire than that of the Seljukides.

The small Turkish clan that was to grow ~
up into the Ottoman Empire only crossed the
Euphrates in the middle of the thirteenth century
to settle at first on one of the great plateaus of
Asia Minor, not far from Angora, which is today
the capital of the new Turkish Republic. Though
the newcomers had picked up Mohammedanism
during their wanderings across Asia, they were
essentially soldiers of fortune ready to hire their
swords out to the highest bidder, Christian as
well as Mohammedan. Some took service in
Asia with the Seljukide Empire, which was already
tottering to its fall, and some in Europe with the
Byzantine Empire or with its Christian rivals,
whether Bulgars or Serbs. They were stout
fighters, and wherever they went as hired mercena-
ries they ultimately remained as masters. From
Othman, the first of their great leaders to proclaim
himself an independent sovereign in 1295, the

[ 20 |THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

dynasty and empire which he founded took the
distinctive name of Ottoman.” His son, Orkhan,
organized his people into a nation in arms whose
bravery in the field was constantly stimulated by
the prospect of boundless plunder and slaves
innumerable. :

The Western Crusaders, turning their eyes away
from Palestine, tried too late to compose their own
differences in order to meet the new storm from
the Orient, and the Byzantine emperor, Cantacu-
zene, himself preferred to seek safety in giving his
young daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the
Ottoman sultan. The Occident, with never a
leader equal to the emergency, and torn by internal
dissensions, squandered -its forces of resistance,
and a succession of fighting sultans who had also
a rough grasp of statesmanship carried their
empire into Europe, with Adrianople as its
first European capital, until the capture of Con-
stantinople in 1452, nine’years after the last Cru-
sade, and installed Mohammed the Conqueror
in the imperial city which Constantine had
created.

The Occident awoke too late to all that the
fall of Constantinople meant. There was an end
to the ancient continuity of empire of which the
tradition had survived the transfer of the seat

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of power from Rome to Constantinople. There
was a new and formidable menace to Christian
civilization itself not long emerged from the
twilight of the Dark Ages. It was the triumph
of Islam over Christendom that Mohammed the
Conqueror celebrated when he rode his horse
straight up to the ancient basilica of St. Sophia
and converted it into a Mohammedan house of
prayer. He was, it is true, wiser than the Turks
of our own times, for he realized the value of his
Christian subjects as an indispensable economic
asset for purposes both of taxation and production,
and more or less contemptuously allowed them
to retain their own communal and ecclesiastical
organization. He was willing, too, to concede
certain privileges known as “capitulations”
the foreign merchants established in the chief
Turkish seaports. But the conqueror never belied
the savagery of his Central Asian race. Christian
heads struck off by his orders adorned his great
banquet after the capture of the imperial city,
which was itself handed over to the tender mercies
of the Turkish soldiery. What they did with it
we know on the authority of a Turkish historian.
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The soldiers thronged into it with joyous hearts, and
there, seizing the possessors and their families, they made

[ 22 ]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

the wretched unbelievers weep. They acted in accordance
with the precept, “Slaughter their aged and capture their
youth.”

Then his victorious armies resumed their
onward march. The Turk’s only real business
was and always has been war. North and south,
east and west, the tide of Turkish conquest rolled
on for another century and more until the bounda-
ries of the Ottoman Empire, whether under the
direct rule or merely under the overlordship of
the sultan, included in Europe not only all those
states now known as the Balkan states, but the
Russian littoral of the Black Sea and part of
Poland and the whole of Hungary, and Austrian
territory almost up to the gates of Vienna and
down to the eastern coast of the Adriatic; in Asia,
the whole of Asia Minor to the borders of Persia
and the Persian Gulf and Syria and Palestine with
the Arabian peninsula right away to the Indian
Ocean; and in Africa, the whole of Egypt and the
coastlands of Tripoli and Tunis and Algiers to
the borders of Morocco on the southern shores
of the Mediterranean.

The Ottoman armies seemed to be invincible
on land, and alone among oriental nations Turkey
developed a naval power which for a time almost

dominated the Mediterranean. The Turkish flood
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rolling in from the east was as grave a threat to
the very existence of Western Christendom in
the sixteenth century as, in the eighth century,
the Arab flood that poured from the south across
the Pyrenees into the very heart of France—
indeed, a still graver threat, for the Arabs had
known not only how to conquer but how to evolve
a great civilization, whereas the Turks were
conquerors and nothing more, who carried with
them everywhere the gross atmosphere of the
armed camp.

Sultan Selim the Grim, the conqueror of Egypt,
had perhaps some higher vision when he sought to
graft on to the immense temporal power of the
Ottoman sultanate the spiritual power of the
Islamic khalifate, and brought back with him to
Constantinople, in 1517, the mantle of the
prophet and the rest of the insignia which had
remained in the possession of one of the descend-
ants of the Abbaside dynasty of Baghdad who
had fled to Cairo and still bore there, under the
Mameluke sultans of Egypt, the title, though
little more than an empty one, of khalif. Hence-
forth the Ottoman sultans assumed that title,
which none had hitherto ventured to claim who
could not at least pretend to trace back his descent
to theArabian prophet. Their right to it was never

[ 24 ]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

universally recognized by orthodox Mohammedans
in other countries or by other Mohammedan sover-
eigns, except as a matter of occasional political
expediency or of mere courtesy. But from that
time the titular leadership of Islam passed finally
from a higher to a lower race, from the Arab to
the Turk.

Under Selim’s son, Soliman the Magnificent,
the sinister growth of the Ottoman Empire
reached its climax. He was the last of its great
sultans, the tenth in succession from Othman,
and at his death in 1566 it entered abruptly
upon its decline, which was almost as rapid as
had been its rise. Henceforth, with rare excep-
tions, the power passed for nearly two centuries
under his feeble and depraved successors into the
Seraglio whence sultanas and concubines misruled
the Empire through corrupt and incompetent
favorites, shamelessly raised to the highest offices
of state. The heirs to the throne were brought up
in what was called the “Cage,” where, if they
were not sooner or later put to death, they were
deliberately debauched and emasculated, in order
that, if and when they ascended the throne, they
should be mere helpless puppets in the hands of
the dominant faction. Those who survived exerted
whatever energy was left to them on their acces-

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sion in killing off their brothers or other members
of their family who, so long as they lived, might
be deemed potential rivals.

The Janissaries were almost the only check
upon the Seraglio. Levied from the Christian
subject races who had to give up their first-born
sons to be brought up as Mohammedans for the
military service of the Empire, they had been the
corps d élite of the Ottoman Army during the long
period of unbroken victory. But in the hour of
its decay they degenerated into a treacherous
Praetorian guard ready to sell its support to
anybody who could afford to purchase it. When
war no longer meant new kingdoms to be delivered
over to their predatory instincts, the Turkish
armies in the field, led by generals as corrupt and
incompetent as the Seraglio favorites who ap-
pointed them, ceased to be invincible, and after their
last assault upon Vienna had been repelled in
1683 by the gallantry of the king of Poland,
John Sobiesky, the European frontiers of Turkey
receded almost continuously after each disastrous
campaign, while anarchy spread throughout the
provinces under increasing misrule, and the
Christian subject races themselves awoke out
of the lethargy of prolonged enslavement to a
returning sense of national consciousness.

[ 26 JTHEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

_ Toward the end of the eighteenth century
the progress of disintegration had already gone so
far that the French ambassador in Constantinople
wrote to his government describing the Turk
as a “sick man” for whose inheritance the
European powers should provide without delay.
The phrase soon came into common use, but it
was premature mainly because the European
powers could not agree among themselves as to
the distribution of the Turk’s inhefitance. The
relations of the Orient and the Occident were
however entering into a new phase. As the
menace of Arab Islam to medieval Europe had
passed away, so also did the menace of Turkish
Islam to modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire
lived on to be in its decrepitude a dangerous
temptation to rival European ambitions as a
bone of contention and more than once a cause
of war between the great powers.

With this phase I shall deal on another occa-
sion. I will conclude today by recalling the one
great service which the rise of the Ottoman
Empire rendered to the world, lest perhaps you
should grow impatient of a story which may
seem to have nothing to do with America. It has,
in fact, everything to do with America, for in
far-away Asia, the Turk, quite unwittingly,

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

precipitated at least one great event, and a most
vital one, in your history, namely, the discovery
of this great continent. It happened in this way.
The ancient Greeks who covered Asia Minor with
their colonies and the Romans whose Empire at
its apogee stretched far into Asia, carried on a
considerable overland trade with the more distant
regions of the Orient;. and in the Middle Ages
Genoa and Venice derived much of their wealth and
power from the valuable commerce which Europe
still maintained with Eastern lands across the Medi-
terranean. When the Ottoman Empire grew up,
it blocked one by one the old Asian land routes of
European trade with the Orient, and its corsairs
even made access to them across the Mediterranean
impossible or at least very risky. But Europe
was not to be balked. The Western nations with
an Atlantic seaboard began to turn their eyes
toward the boundless horizon of the Atlantic, and
Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus
and other hardy navigators launched their frail
craft upon the unexplored ocean and opened up
new highways to a new world.

The Spaniards and the Portuguese were the
first to make the great adventure, and they made
it in the sole hope of discovering a new trade route
across the seas to the legendary wealth of the

[ 28 ]THEIR ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

Indies. Columbus himself was in quest of the
Indies when he stumbled upon America, and he
indeed imagined that he had reached the Indies
when, as it turned out, he was landing on a
brand-new continent. Hence for some time the
Spaniards and the Portuguese, who were the
pioneers of ocean navigation, called both North
and South America ‘“‘Las Indias,” and their
delusion has been preserved in the name “Indians,”
which the aboriginal races of this continent still
bear, as well as in that of the West Indies, the
group of islands still under the British flag in the
Caribbean Sea. Indeed, the discovery of America
did not divert the resolute navigators of Western
Europe from their original search for an ocean
route to India.

While after their first great achievements the
Spaniards applied themselves chiefly to tightening
their hold upon Central and Southern America,
the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope
and landed on the western shores of India. By
the time the English followed in their wake, the
Turkish conquest of Egypt had closed the last of
the old avenues of European trade with the East
which the Mameluke sultans of Cairo, so long
as they were independent of Constantinople, had
allowed to remain open for the sake of the enor-

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mous tolls they levied upon it in transit across
Egypt.

It was, like Columbus, with the hope of reach-
ing India that John Cabot first sailed from England
across the Atlantic, in the last years of the fifteenth
century, and merely discovered Newfoundland.
Not until Sir Walter Raleigh, as a graceful compli-
ment to Queen Elizabeth, gave the name of
Virginia to a large tract of country in North
America, did his fellow-countrymen’s eyes begin
to turn with no less curiosity to the new continent
of America than to the legendary shores of India.
Then and for nearly two centuries the history of
the early British colonies in North America was
closely bound up with that of the early British
settlements in India.

Of all this the Turk was blissfully unaware.
He understood nothing about economic pressure.
He believed only in the power of his sword. The
vast Empire which his sword conquered has passed
away, but the great historical fact remains that,
when his sword closed to Western trade its old
rights of way to the Orient, it was he who drove
Europe to discover America just when she did, and
to call in the New World to redress the balance of
the Old more than three centuries before Canning
uttered his famous phrase just a century ago.

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The chief innovation in the domain of inter-
national relations during the nineteenth century
was the assertion of the principle of nationality
i.e., of the right of peoples to group themselves
according to their ethnical and ethical affinities
into independent political entities or states. After
long struggles with the old principles of paramount
dynastic interests exalted at the Congress of Vienna
in 1815 and in the Holy Alliance, the principle of
nationality won through in Europe in the unifica-
tion of Italy and of Germany, as it had already
won through in the successful revolt of the Spanish
and Portuguese dominions in South America, and
as it won through also in the preservation of the
North American union in this great Republic,
though at the cost of a terrible Civil War.

From the very beginning of the nineteenth
century the same principle began also to affect
very profoundly the relations between the Occident
and the Orient, with the decay of the old Ottoman

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Empire built up on the destruction of whole nations,
and with the reawakening of the Christian sub-
ject races in European Turkey. Pitiful remnants
of the medieval Occident, they had been mangled
for centuries under the Turkish harrow, but their
spark of life had never been wholly extinguished.
The Turkish hand had been heavy upon them,
and every family had to surrender a son to be
brought up as a Mohammedan for military service
in the corps of Janissaries, but they had collectively
retained their own faith. It was in the interests
of the ruling race to conserve the Christian
communities as hewers of wood and drawers of
water. There was a limit under the Sacred
Law to the taxation which could be imposed
upon the sultan’s Mohammedan subjects; there
was none to the taxation of his Christian sub-
jects.

So the Christians had been allowed to preserve
their churches and their priests, their separate
languages and their ancient folksongs, and with
them some things of their national soul. The
vast majority belonged to the Eastern or Orthodox
church, and for this reason Russia, who was of
the same communion, was the first great European
power to take a not altogether unselfish interest
in their fate.

{ 34]PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

In the eighteenth century Catherine the Great
at war with Turkey openly proclaimed herself
the champion of the orthodox Christian popula-
tions of the Balkan peninsula, and the partition
of European Turkey was mooted between Russia,
Prussia, and Austria and only postponed because
they found it easier for the time being to satisfy
their ambition by the partition of Poland. The
French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars,
which convulsed the whole European continent,
sent a fresh thrill of hope through the Balkan
peoples. To the Serbs belongs the honor of
having been the first to rise in open rebellion in
1805 against their Turkish masters, and, though
their heroic struggle ended in temporary failure,
they blazed the trail for others. When the
Greeks in their turn rose, they had this advantage,
that their cause appealed directly to all those who
remembered what Western civilization owed to
ancient Greece.

In spite of many cross-currents that favored
Turkey, the most staggering blow since Lepanto
was dealt to Turkish naval power when the com-
bined fleets of England, France, and Russia under
Admiral Codrington destroyed the Turkish fleet
in Greek waters at Navarino in 1820; but only
after a Russian army had entered Adrianople in

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1829 did Turkey recognize the Hellenic kingdom
as the first independent state carved out of her
dominions in the Balkan peninsula. And let me
say here straightway with regard not only to
Greece, but also to Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania
—all Slav Balkan states carved out of European
Turkey
of their rulers and their peoples, there is not one
that on its record taken as a whole has failed to
justify its emancipation. Nobody who had an

 

that with all the grave shortcomings

opportunity of comparing conditions in those
countries before the Balkan wars with the condt-
tion of the provinces then still under Turkish rule
could for a moment question the social and
intellectual and economic strides which they had
made since their liberation. They were nations
instinct with life, whilst the dead hand of Turkey
still weighed heavily on every people still subject
to the Ottoman sultans.

When at the end of the Greek war of independ-
ence the Ottoman Empire seemed to be at the last
gasp, it received a fresh lease of life from Anglo-
Russian rivalry, henceforth until nearly the end
of the nineteenth century the dominant factor in
the relations between the Occident and the Orient.
Russia was known to have long cast covetous
eyes upon Constantinople, which she significantly

{ 36}PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

called Tsargrad, the city of the Eastern Caesars,
to whom the Russian czars claimed mystic
heirship.

This was a claim into which British statesmen
had some excuse for reading a dangerous challenge
to British power in Asia as well as in Europe.
They remembered the plans discussed between
Napoleon and Alexander I at Tilsit for a joint
invasion of India across Persia by Russian and
French armies, and they scented in Russia’s
expansion at the cost of Turkey a definite menace
to India on her northwest land frontier which
British supremacy at sea could not by itself
avail to counter. Moreover, British naval power
was being confronted with new and difficult
problems. Steam navigation was promising to
open up quicker lines of communication with
India through the Mediterranean and the Red
Sea than round the Cape of Good Hope, and the
safety of the new overland route across Egypt
would, it was felt, be gravely imperiled if the
eastern Mediterranean came to be dominated by
a great European power intrenched at Constantt-
nople and on the straits.

This danger could no longer be regarded as
remote when the revolt, for a long time victorious,

of the great pasha of Egypt, Mohamed Ali,
[ 37]

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against his Turkish overlord suddenly threatened
to disrupt the Turkish Empire and led Russia
to show her own hand somewhat prematurely.
For, on the plea of protecting the Turkish capital
against the rapid advance of the Egyptian armies,
Czar Nicolas I made haste, in 1833, to land large
Russian forces at Constantinople, and he only
withdrew them, under strong diplomatic pressure
from the rest of Europe, after he had wrung from
the sultan the Treaty of Ungkiar Skelessi, which,
had Russia been allowed to carry it into effect,
would have meant placing the whole Ottoman
Empire under a virtual Russian protectorate.
Apart from that treaty the special title which
the Czar claimed to the protection of the
sultan’s Christian subjects as fellow-members of
the same Christian communion could still be
pressed at any moment, and to much the same
purpose.

Was there any other way of averting this
menace than by constraining Turkey to put her
house in order and deprive Russia of her excuse
for interference in a reformed Ottoman Empire ?
This was at any rate the policy urged upon British
ministers by a masterful ambassador at Constanti-
nople, Sir Stratford Canning, who had watched
the tortuous methods of Russian diplomacy at

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close quarters, and was honestly convinced that
there might yet be time to make Turkey mend her
ways and convert her, with British support, into
a solid bulwark against further encroachments of
Russian power in the East, either toward Constan-
tinople or toward India. Canning’s policy postu-
lated, of course, the maintenance of the territorial
integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and was therefore
in direct conflict with Russian policy which aimed
at its destruction, either by direct action, or by
promoting under her aegis the rise of independent
Christian states, to be carved, as the Hellenic
kingdom had already been, out of the Turkish
dominions in Europe.

The czar Nicolas had vast ambitions, but they
were not directed merely toward the material
agerandizement of his Empire. He believed him-

elf to be specially charged with the providential
mission of removing from the map of Europe
the incurable plague spot which he, and many
Englishmen too, saw Turkey to be. But he pro-
fessed himself ready to seek, in the fulfilment of
his mission, the co-operation of other powers, and
even of Great Britain, the only other European
power that already had, like Russia, a great stake
in the Orient. Twice, in 1844 and 1853, he made
overtures to British ministers, with every appear-

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ance of sincerity and on not ungenerous terms, for
a final partition of the Ottoman Empire, which he
at least was convinced would never mend its ways,
and must therefore be ended once and for all.

It is idle to speculate on what might have
happened if Britain had entertained those over-
tures. But suspicion of Russia was too deep
seated, and they were rejected. It was the part-
ing of the ways, and England took what many
Englishmen, including myself, have long since
held to have been the wrong turning. Only a
few years later she found herself fighting the
Crimean War against Russia and in defense of
Turkey, and, when it was over and Russia tempo-
rarily defeated, the Ottoman Empire was solemnly
admitted by the Paris Treaty of 1856 into the
“comity of civilized nations.”

This was a theatrical transformation scene in
the relations between the Occident and the Orient,
but nothing more. Another two decades showed
the Turk to be as incorrigible as ever. The only
thing that the Turkish ruler had learned was how
to borrow and squander huge sums of money which
European financiers were willing to lend him as
soon as he had been welcomed into the comity
of civilized nations. All his promises of reforms
remained a dead letter.

I 40 |PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

When in the seventies rebellion broke out in
various Christian provinces of European Turkey,
the customary methods of repression were em-
ployed as of old and culminated in the Bulgarian
atrocities of 1876. The powers were agreed that the
Turkish situation had become intolerable but they
could not agree upon the remedy. They held a
great conference at Constantinople at the end of
1876 which ended in failure. Then the czar, Alex-
ander II, took the law into his own hands, and
early in 1878 his armies stood at the gates of
the Turkish capital.

Once more the old fear of Russian ascendancy
drove Britain to the verge of war in order to save
Turkey. In spite of Gladstone’s fiery crusade
against Turkish misrule, Disraelt, who was then
British prime minister, carried the country with
him in crying halt to Russia, and in view of the
imminence of war Indian troops were brought
as far as Malta. Orientals had already often
fought side by side with Europeans against other
Europeans on eastern battlefields, but never be-
fore had it been proposed to array them against
Europeans on European battlefields. This was
a new and momentous precedent, though on that
occasion the Indian troops never went beyond
Malta. Russia could not afford to embark on

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

another war, and after having imposed upon the
beaten Turk the Treaty of San Stefano, which
would have liberated the greater part of European
Turkey from the Ottoman yoke, she agreed to
have it referred to a Congress at Berlin which
whittled down its most important provisions and
restored large areas to Turkish rule.

Turkey was, indeed, bound over to reorganize
her bankrupt finances, and besides the customary
promises to introduce large administrative reforms
in all the provinces, she was specially pledged in
regard to her Asiatic provinces to Great Britain
who undertook to defend them against external
aggression under a secret agreement by which the
sultan handed over to her the island of Cyprus
save for the retention of his nominal sovereignty
and a fixed portion of revenue.

But the powers claimed no direct control over
the execution of the reforms, and though a watchful
eye was to be kept upon them by their ambassadors
at Constantinople, their angles of vision were
apt to be very different, and in the person of
Abdul Hamid a new sultan was now on the throne
whose sinister statesmanship soon broke up the
so-called “Concert of Europe.”

Even before Selim the Grim’s conquest of
Egypt, the Ottoman sultans had sometimes

{ 42 ]PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

boastfully called themselves khalifs, though it is
from his reign that the Turkish khalifate is
generally held to date. But until the latter part
of the nineteenth century his successors had made
very little capital out of the spiritual authority
which that title implied. Selim died too soon, and
his immediate successor, Soliman the Magnificent,
was too much absorbed in the European wars of
conquest which filled his long reign. After him
the power of the sultans passed to the Seraglio,
and that was not an atmosphere in which much
thought was given to spiritual authority.

More recently, when, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, Turkish statesmen under
British influence were trying to fit a modern
facade on to the decaying Empire, they were so
anxious to affect European usages and to dissemble
the old oriental Adam that the ruler of Turkey
preferred for a time to adopt in international
treaties the title not of “sultan,” and still less of
“Khalif.’ but of “emperor” of the Ottomans,
which at least sounded more occidental. Abdul
Hamid II, whom a succession of palace tragedies
had put on the throne in 1876 just before the
Russo-Turkish War, was the first to turn the
khalifate to practical account. When he was a
youth, a pious fakir, who claimed to have dis-

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covered his star in the heavens, prophesied to him
that he was destined to revive the ancient glory
of Islam as sultan and khalif. Perhaps it was in
remembrance of that prophecy that he called
his new palace Yeldiz Kiosk, or the “pavilion of
the star,” and he was at any rate determined to
remind the world that he was khalif as well as
sultan, and that he meant to seek in the exercise
of his spiritual sovereignty as khalif substantial
compensation for the curtailment of territorial
sovereignty which infidel Europe had inflicted
upon him as sultan.

It was a bold reversion to the original con-
ception of Islamic theocracy, and one cannot deny
a certain element of greatness both to the concep-
tion itself and to the systematic if ruthless deter-
mination with which he labored to carry it into
effect. His first care was to restore the autocratic
power of the sultanate. He quickly rid himself
of the paper constitution which Midhat Pasha
had devised, chiefly, it must be said, in order to
throw dust in the eyes of Europe, and banished
its author into Arabia, where he conveniently
died of a cup of coffee. He broke up the old
Turkish bureaucratic ring which for two or three
generations had ruled or misruled the Empire
from the offices of the Sublime Porte at Stamboul,

[ 44 JPASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

and he made his palace, from which he seldom
ventured forth even into the streets of his capital,
the one center of government from which his
immediate orders traveled, often over the heads
of ministers and governors, to the most distant
parts of his dominions and to his carefully selected
representatives and agents abroad.

The first public intimation of the new Pan-
Islamic policy by which he hoped to rally the
whole Mohammedan world around the Turkish
khalifate was the appointment in 1881 of a Tuni-
sian as grand vizier, and he emphasized its signifi-
cance by declaring in the firman of appointment
that as khalif he had the right to claim the services
of all orthodox Mohammedans throughout the
worldofIslam. I wasin Constantinople at the time
and well remember what a sensation it produced
among all the old Turkish officials who looked upon
the grand vizierate as part of their monopoly.

It was not among his own slow-witted Turkish
people that Abdul Hamid meant to look for the
instruments of a policy ranging far beyond his
temporal dominions. He surrounded himself at
Yeldiz with Arab Syrians and Kurds and Albanians
who were his secretaries and confidants and spies,
and even the garrison at Constantinople that
watched over his safety was composed of regiments

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drawn mainly from the non-Turkish Mohammedan
races of his Empire. Like a spider in his web
he spun from Yeldiz an ever expanding web of
Pan-Islamic propaganda which carried his fame
as sultan and khalif among Mohammedans far
and near, and especially among those whose
loyalty to their alien rulers he hoped to shake as
a means of large political reprisal. It was his
good fortune ultimately to enlist the support of
one great European potentate.

Germany had stepped into England’s shoes at
Constantinople after Lord Salisbury had come
at last to the conclusion that in backing Turkey
we had backed the wrong horse. But so long as
Bismarck was in power German influence at
Constantinople was exerted mainly for the purpose
of warding off a conflict between Russia and
Austria which might have compelled him to take
sides with the one or the other power—the very
thing he most dreaded having to do. William I,
on the contrary, saw in Turkey Germany’s bridge
head to world-dominion, and his first quarrel
with Bismarck arose when the old chancellor re-
plied to him that in-his political dictionary there
was no such term as “ world-dominion.”’

Bismarck fell, and a few years afterward, in
1898, William II, throwing his mantle over

[ 46 |PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Turkey, was the first and only Christian sovereign
to hail Abdul Hamid, in his famous speech at
Damascus, as “his friend and ally whom
300,000,000 Mohammedans throughout the world
revere as their khalif.”’ This effusive demonstra-
tion, only a few days after the German emperor
had been masquerading as a crusader at Jerusalem,
was particularly precious to Abdul Hamid, for
the Armenian massacres had just then sent a
thrill of horror through the Western World.

Abdul Hamid was no fanatic; he often showed
a great personal liking for individual Europeans
and for many European customs. He had even
a taste for European music and drama and built
himself a private theater in the grounds of Yeldiz.
He was an adroit diplomatist and could knock
the heads of the European ambassadors together
in order to set the concert of Europe at logger-
heads, but he would make up for it at once
by lavishing the most delicate attentions upon
them and still more upon their wives. But
in matters of policy he had no bowels of compunc-
tion.

He was pledged by treaty to introduce far-
reaching reforms into his Armenian provinces, but
what would the Islamic world say if the khalif
were to grant equality to one of his Christian

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subject races? These Christian subject races
had already disintegrated his Empire in Europe.
Were the Armenians to disintegrate his Empire in
Asia? He could see no practical solution that
would rid him of the noxious Armenian question
except to get rid of the Armenians themselves,
and he felt he could defy the judgment of all other
civilized nations if the German emperor stood by
him in his shining armor. William II was quite
satisfied with the bargain. He got his Baghdad
Railway Concession and many others, besides the
congenial privilege of reorganizing the Turkish
Army under German officers.

Abdul Hamid continued to misrule despotically
his own long-suffering people and intermittently
to kill off his Armenians whenever occasion offered,
while he built with German help his Hejaz
Railway to the Holy Places of Arabia, which was
certainly the finest bit of Pan-Islamic propaganda
he ever did, as agents from Yeldiz perambulated
the whole Mohammedan world to collect subscrip-
tions for that pious work and to sing the praises
of the great khalif and sultan who was its author.

But he had turned his own people against him
by an inquisitional system of government work-
ing chiefly through corruption and delation. No
one was safe whom his legions of spies chose to

[ 48 ]PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

denounce as disloyal, and disaffection was equally
rife in the army, which he had always dreaded
and kept at arm’s length.

The Turkish revolution of 1908-1909 began as
a military revolt, but it ended by placing in power
a committee known as the Union and Progress
Committee, which was composed not only of
revolted officers, but of a younger generation of
Turkish civilians, many of whom had spent years
in exile and had caught up some of the catchwords
at least of Western democracy and freedom of
thought. Religion sat very lightly upon them,
and some of them were not even Mohammedans,
but Jews and crypto-Jews from Salonica, which
had long been a hotbed of disaffection.

Under Abdul Hamid’s semi-imbecile successor,
a brother whom he had kept a state prisoner for
thirty years in a gilded cage, members of the
Union and Progress Committee were the real
rulers of Turkey. The Occident hailed in them
at first the advent of a new era in the Orient, and
in Turkey itself all Ottomans, irrespective of
creed and race, celebrated a short, delirious honey-
moon to the tune of “Liberty, Justice, and Frater-
nity.” Even during the honeymoon, however,
the Turks carefully eschewed the word “equality,”
and the Union and Progress men soon began to

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display the cloven hoof of their new Turkish
nationalism, which they enforced almost as ruth-
lessly upon Mohammedan non-Turkish as upon
Christian subject races. Their dream was to
build up a great Turkish state which should
include all the peoples of northern Persia and
Afghanistan and Central Asia with whom the
Turk could claim to have or to have had at any
time in history some racial or linguistic affinity.
This was known as the Pan-Turanian movement
of which Enver Pasha was to become the chief
apostle during the Great War.

Meanwhile, Pan-Islamism receded into the
background. But it was too useful a second
string to be given up altogether, especially when
the Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911 and the
Balkan Wars of 1912-13 gave the Young Turks
a plausible excuse for appealing to the sympathies
of the whole Mohammedan Orient against the
European powers who, with the one exception of
Germany, were denounced as conspiring to crush
Turkey as the last bulwark of Islam. Even
Germany’s attitude sometimes perplexed the
Young Turks, but William II always knew how
to humor them and retain their affections against
“the day” which he had long foreseen when
Turkey’s fourteen army corps would provide

I so JPASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

a valuable adjunct to the great Germanic
armies.

When the Young Turks dragged their country
into the Great War at Germany’s heels, they
made one desperate attempt to turn the Turkish
khalifate to account. In the name of the khalif,
a Fehad, or “holy war,’”’ was proclaimed against
the Allies. It helped, perhaps, in Turkey itself
to create a proper atmosphere for resuming on an
unprecedented scale the Hamidian policy of
exterminating the Christian populations, but it
fell completely flat amongst the Mohammedans
outside the Turkish Empire, who seemed to realize
that it was something of a paradox for Turkey
to proclaim a holy war against infidels when she
was herself in alliance with other infidels.

Indian and French Mohammedan troops
fought loyally on the Western front against the
Germans, and, still more significant, Indians and
even Egyptians fought equally well against their
Turkish co-religionists on the Suez Canal, in
Syria, and in Mesopotamia.

For our knowledge of what happened in Turkey
during the Great War we are indebted largely to
many brave American missionaries in the interior,
and to Morgenthau, the United States ambassador
in Constantinople, while Lord Bryce, whose

{ 51 |THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

memory is still I think as much honored on
your side as on our side of the Atlantic applied
himself to collect the overwhelming mass of
evidence on which he framed for the British
Parliament his formidable indictment of Turkish
savagery.

The outstanding features were the wholesale
massacres and mass deportations, scarcely less
deadly, which were deliberately and systematically
carried out in 1915-16 throughout the principal
Armenian districts of Asia Minor by the Turkish
military and civil authorities under Enver, the
minister of war, and Talaat, the minister of
the interior. Compared with such atrocities, the
brutality of the Turks toward British prisoners
of war is a minor matter, but Englishmen cannot
easily forget that nearly 50 per cent of them
perished in consequence of Turkish callousness
and ill-treatment. Throughout the Empire, cor-
ruption and misrule surpassed all records, and
while Enver, who, though commander-in-chief,
did not shrink from starving the Turkish armies
in order to fill his own pockets, and Talaat and
the rest battened at Constantinople on state
plunder, famine and epidemics devastated the
civil population throughout the whole length
and breadth of the country.

[ 52]PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

By the time the Turks sued for an armistice
in October, 1918, we have it on the authority of
the American Relief Committee that a quarter
of the whole population of the Ottoman Empire
had perished since 1914 from war casualties,
disease, starvation, and massacre.

Most of the war leaders fled as soon as they
saw the game was up, and the new Turkish
government was quite prepared to accept the
penalties of defeat. Had the Allies imposed
their terms of peace at once, they would have been
accepted even had they been as severe as those
which were embodied two years later in the
abortive Treaty of Sévres. The war aims of the
Allies had been repeatedly proclaimed. Turkey
was to be banished from Europe, and if Constantt-
nople itself was not to go to Greece, with the rest
of Thrace, it was to become a free city under
international contral:;:}n, Asja:’Minar,: Smyrna
and the surrounding ‘région, “im ‘which’ the Greek
population undotibtedly ~prédominated, was to
form an autonomous province. “The ‘remriants
of the Armenian people were to be gathered into
an independent Armenian state, the Arab provinces
were to be permanently detached from Turkey,
and a drastic control established over the whole
Turkish administration in order to make all

153]THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

subject races and the Turkish people themselves
safe against any renewal of the worst forms of
Turkish oppression.

But the long delays of Allied diplomacy and
the revival of European jealousies, and, more
indirectly, America’s withdrawal into her own
shell after the Treaty of Versailles, gave Turkey
breathing time and allowed Mustapha Kemal,
one of the few Turkish generals who had earned
the respect of his adversaries during the war, to
reorganize the Turkish armies and get Turkey,
though heavily beaten in the first round, into
condition to fight a second round as soon as a
Greek army landed in Asia Minor.

There have been many lamentable pages in
the long history of the relations between the
Occident and the Orient on which the bankruptcy
of occidental statesmanship has been writ large,
but ‘none ‘meré lamentable: than those on which
will stand ‘forever’ recorded: in the blood of
hundreds “Of thousands of innocent victims the
failure’ ‘of ‘Westéri statesmanship in the Near
East during the five years that followed the end
of the Great War. Things might have been very
different had America with her fine record of
educational and cultural activities in Turkey been
willing to undertake mandatory responsibilities

{ 54 ]i I Ts |

PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

in Armenia or even in the Arab lands detached
from the Ottoman Empire, but for reasons which
it might be unseemly for me to criticize on this
occasion, she declined, and with that decision
which I may at any rate be permitted to deplore,
her responsibility begins and ends.

Not so the responsibility of the European
powers concerned, and painful as it is to me to
have to admit it, the heaviest responsibility of all
must rest on my own country. It was the British
armies and the British fleets that had broken the
power of Turkey. Not only did we hold Syria
and Mesopotamia, but Constantinople and the
chief strategic points of Asia Minor had passed
into British hands immediately after the Armistice.

I was attached to the British delegation at the
Paris Peace Conference, and there among those who
had any knowledge of the East was no one who
could fail to realize the urgency of imposing the
Allied peace terms upon Turkey while we were
still in a position to enforce them.

But Lloyd George knew better. Someone had
told him that the East was never in a hurry and
that Turkey could wait. So for reasons of internal
policy and to meet the popular clamor for demobili-
zation and retrenchment, the greater part of the
British forces were withdrawn and French and

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Italian troops were invited to take their place
and supply the material pressure which we were
no longer prepared to maintain.

Far be it from me to excuse the part which
the French and the Italians subsequently played
in parleying with the Turks on their own account
and in what they with incredible folly deemed to
be their own national interests. But had we
ourselves shown greater steadfastness in holding
the fort, our allies would never have been given
the opportunity to succumb to the temptation
offered to them by proximity to the Turkish
Empire.

Similarly, with the landing of the Greek armies
in Asia Minor, Lloyd George was at last com-
pelled to recognize what was to be the outcome
of his strange notion that Turkey could wait.
The Greek troops landed, it is true, in the first
instance at the joint invitation of the three Allied
Powers, but that the invitation was issued at
Lloyd George’s instance has never been in doubt.
It is also clear that even when at a later date the
British government joined with the French and
Italian governments in advising Greece to with-
draw her forces from Asia Minor and proclaiming
their neutrality should Greece persevere in a
military adventure which they professed equally

1 56}PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

to condemn, Lloyd George continued with
strange levity to hold a language which the
Greeks could not construe otherwise than as a
direct encouragement to disregard the advice
officially given to them—a language which,
whatever his intentions may have been, directly
contributed to the final disaster.

Unless the Allies, and more especially England,
were prepared to see the Greeks through, the
landing of the Greek Army in Asia Minor was
unquestionably a most dangerous challenge to
Turkish racial pride. Then, too, and only then,
was a considerable part of the Mohammedan
world which had remained almost entirely indiffer-
ent to the fate of Turkey during the Great War
suddenly seized with an overwhelming anxiety
as to the terms to be imposed upon her. Nowhere,
as I shall show on another occasion, was the excite-
ment greater than among Indian Mohammedans,
who professed to see in the policy of the Allied
Powers, and more especially of Britain, an attack
upon the Turkish khalifate and therefore upon
the Mohammedan religion. It was a_ belated
revival of Hamidian Pan-Islamism. The Turks
naturally played up to it. But the Graeco-
Turkish conflict in itself had nothing to do with
the question of the Turkish khalifate, which was

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not even mentioned in the national pact in which
the Grand National Assembly embodied its
challenge to the Allied Powers.

It was not so much a religious as a racial war
which revived and fired to white heat the fierce
nationalism of a ruling race who still regarded all
Greeks as mere rebels, to be expelled and extermi-
nated as such, not on any purely religious ground,
but on the same grounds of high policy on which
Abdul Hamid had determined to root out the
Armenians.

One has only to look at what happened at
Angora after the Turks had smashed the Greek
armies and turned the essentially Greek city of
Smyrna into an ash-heap as a proof of their
victory. The British forces at Chanak on the
Asiatic side of the straits and at Constantinople
prevented a Turkish rush across to Thrace.
But the Turks nevertheless got their own terms
before the Mudania Convention brought hostilities
to a close on October 11, 1922.

Then, to use a trivial phrase, Mustapha Kemal
and the new Turkey represented in the Grand
National Assembly gave the show away. For it
became evident that they had merely exploited
both the sultanate and the khalifate as useful
assets in a conflict in which the Turks had been

1 58 |PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

fighting, above all, for their racial supremacy,
when on November 2, 1922, they not only deposed
the sultan but put an end to the Ottoman sultanate
and deprived the khalif of all temporal power.
The word “‘republic” was not yet uttered, and the
khalifate itself was not actually abolished. But,
if a new khalif was appointed, who was still chosen
from the ancient House of Othman, he was no
longer to be sultan nor to be invested with the
sword of Othman.

This was already a negation of the theocratic
state which Abdul Hamid had tried to revive in
the Ottoman Empire. By the strange irony of
things it happened, too, that the first member of
the House of Othman to be cast for the new part
of a purely spiritual ruler in the Mohammedan
world was also the only one who had received
something of a European education, who had some
knowledge of European languages, and who had
often displayed in public a very unorthodox liking
for European ways of life.

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All this was already a thoroughly revolu-
tionary departure from both Turkish and Islamic
traditions. But much more was to follow when
the final treaty of peace between Europe and the
new Turkish state was at last signed after many
diplomatic vicissitudes at Lausanne on July 24,

[59h

Seat aa peeTHE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

1923. The treaty itself was an abject surrender
on the part of a war-weary and divided Europe.
It was also on the part of England especially a
surrender to a pro-Turkish Mohammedan agitation
in India which, wholly artificial as it was at first,
assumed, thanks to the weakness of the govern-
ment of India, such a menacing character that
it ended by intimidating the government of the
British Empire. It restored not only Constanti-
nople but eastern Thrace to the Turk and placed
him once more in possession of the Bosporus and
the Dardanelles—subject only to conditions of
demilitarization which may read well enough on
paper but which have as their only safeguard the
authority of the League of Nations, and, remember-
ing Corfu, that is still rather a weak reed to lean on.

Turkey, it is true, had to acquiesce in the loss
of her Arab provinces with the exception of Mosul,
reserved for subsequent negotiation between
Turkey and England or for reference in the last
resort to the League of Nations, whose name seems
to have been called in aid in this as in many other
cases as the one means of disguising failure to
agree. Throughout Asia Minor Turkish rule
was revived without any of the restraints which
the Treaty of Sévres would have placed upon it.
The cruelest mockery of all was the clause that

[ 60 }PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

professed to provide for the rights of minorities
which have in fact almost entirely ceased to exist.
Not a word was said about the unfortunate
Armenians, whose scattered remnants were aban-
doned to the tender mercies of the Turk, or
about the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had been
driven forth over a million in number from their
ancient homelands. Even the few that still re-
mained were compelled to follow them into exile
under an article of the treaty providing for the
compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish
populations with the sole exception of the 300,000
Greeks residing in Constantinople itself.

A large part of the Mohammedan world hailed
Mustapha Kemal once more as the ever victorious
sword of Islam. Mustapha Kemal had no further
use for the sword of Islam. Intoxicated, perhaps,
by his own personal triumph, he felt himself free
to throw off all further restraints. On October 29
Turkey was declared a republic by the Grand
National Assembly and Mustapha Kemal unani-
mously elected to be its first president with practi-
cally dictatorial powers, for, besides being head of
the state and commander-in-chief of the army,
he was made president of the Grand National
Assembly and president of the Council of Ministers.
The position of the khalif still remained nominally

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unchanged but signs were soon not wanting that
his days as khalif were also numbered. He had
remained in Constantinople, and Angora suspected
him of encouraging the discontent of which the old
imperial capital, now turned into a mere provincial
capital, was the center.

An ominous campaign in the press controlled
by the men of Angora was the prelude to a resolu-
tion passed on March 3, by the Grand National
Assembly, with only two dissentient votes, for the
summary abolition of the khalifate. The very
next day the sentence of deposition was read to
the khalif at Constantinople and that night he
and his son were put across the European frontier;
a few days later all the remaining members,
male and female, of the House of Othman were
likewise banished, and all their inherited and
personal possessions, palaces and jewels and the
rest, were confiscated for the use of the state.

To emphasize the significance of this action a
series of drastic measures were forthwith enacted
by the Grand National Assembly. The Shetkh-
ul-Islam, who had formerly held rank immediately
after the grand vizier, was to be no longer even
a member of the cabinet, and his functions were
to be purely religious. All the property of the
Evkaf, or pious foundations, was appropriated

[ 62 }PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

to the state. The administration of the law
hitherto based entirely upon ‘the Koran was sub-
ordinated to the civil authority, just as national
education also was by the abolition of all religious
state schools.

Not only have the Ottoman sultanate that
had existed for seven centuries and the Ottoman
khalifate which had existed for four centuries
passed out of the pages of history, but the Turkish
Republic has come into being as a lay-republic
which is the very negation of Islam. One of the
great factors in the relations of the Orient with
the Occident has disappeared with consequences
which cannot yet be fully foreseen. In the first
place, we cannot yet fully apprehend the reasons
which have prompted the rulers of Turkey, or
one should perhaps say, the ruler rather than
rulers, for Mustapha Kemal stands out so far
as the one absolutely dominant figure in the new
Turkish state. His personality is a perplexing
one. The British Army knows him as the able
soldier and clean fighter of Gallipoli, who defeated
its last great effort on the heights above Suvla
Bay in August, 1915; his patriotism and integrity
are alone singled out for praise in the singularly

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

military and political conditions while he was head
of the German Military Mission in Turkey before
and during the Great War. To his energy and
capacity must be mainly ascribed the reorganiza-
tion of the Turkish Army after the Great War and
the national effort by which the Greek armies were
driven out of Asia Minor, though the Greek
disasters were in fact due in a far greater measure
to the dissensions among the Allies, who finally
abandoned Greece to her fate and to the folly
and incompetence of King Constantine and his
ministers in Athens. That there are in Mustapha
Kemal elements of real greatness can hardly be
disputed, and- such has been the obstructive
influence exercised with rare exceptions on human
progress, social and political, that we have no
reason to regret the shattering blow dealt by
Mustapha Kemal to the revival of a militant
Pan-Islamism.

How far bolshevist influences and the example
of Lenin may have affected him I shall come to
in one of my subsequent addresses on the new
factor which bolshevism has imported into the
relations between the Occident and the Ortent.
Those who would put the best construction on his
policy still contend that he is above all an enlight-
ened reformer, and, from the absence of any at

] 64 }PASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

all considerable opposition to the revolutionary
changes which he has enacted, they are disposed
to infer that he himself merely reflects a great
psychological change wrought in the mentality
of a large majority of the Turkish people by the
terrible ordeal of almost continuous warfare and
the frightful hardships which Turkey has passed
through during the last twelve or thirteen years.
But it is difficult to see how far Turkey has
profited by exchanging a narrow religious fanatt-
cism for an equally narrow racial fanaticism.
Turkish dreams of a great Pan-Turanian Empire
may be dismissed as more visionary than ever
since bolshevist Russia has resumed the hold which
czarist Russia had established on Central Asia.
All we need consider is what Turkey actually is
today. Her population is estimated at between
6,000,000 and 8,000,000, decimated by the war
and believed to be still shrinking, as it was already
doing before the war, from congenital disease.
It will, it is true, be for the first time an almost
purely Turkish population, for of the Greeks and
Armenians who in 1g14 still numbered some
3,000,000 in Asia Minor only the scantiest rem-
nants are left. Yet they were the most intel-
ligent and economically valuable communities
in the old Ottoman Empire. They were almost

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everywhere the chief and often the only traders,
petty shopkeepers in the villages, and merchants
and financiers sometimes on a large scale in the
towns. ‘They are gone. They may have been
in many ways unworthy successors to the splendid
Hellenic culture of which the memory lingers in
the names of the old Greek cities of Asia Minor
and not less in the epistles of the New Testament,
but though on a lower plane they were still until
yesterday the brains of the country.

The European settlements which also played
their very important part in the economic develop-
ment of Turkey have lost, by the abolition of the
capitulations, under the Treaty of Lausanne, the
permanent safeguards which all Western powers
had hitherto deemed essential for the security
of foreign life and property in a state where justice,
as administered in a Turkish court, has been
hitherto a byword. The new Turkey has not
formally repudiated her old financial obligations
abroad as soviet Russia has done, but in practice
she has already begun to scrap them. Yet she
can be saved from absolute bankruptcy only
by restoring her shattered credit abroad.

Owing to her geographical position and to the
fighting qualities of her people, the new Turkey

may never be a wholly negligible factor in the

[ 66 IPASSING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Near East, but she can hardly aspire to a much
higher position than that of a third-rate power
barely equal in general resources to any of the
Balkan states over which she used to rule, and she
has herself abdicated the prestige and influence
which the possession of the Turkish khalifate had,
in our days at any rate, conferred upon her.
The khalifate as a Mohammedan institution will
not cease to exist, for as such it must not be
confused with the Ottoman khalifate because it
has lately suited the purpose of many Moham-
medans to identify the one with the other. It
existed long before the Ottoman Empire and may
continue to exist long after it.

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But wherever else the khalifate may be revived,
the Ottoman khalif has disappeared with the
Ottoman sultanate, and this is one of the great
events—so great that a few years ago it would have
been deemed unthinkable—in the history of the
relations between the Occident and the Orient.

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Egypt deserves, I think, separate treatment,
for nowhere else have we a better illustration of
the play of modern economic as well as social and
religious forces on the relations between the
Occident and the Orient.

The land of the ancient pharaohs was conquered
by the Persians in the fifth century B.c., and
became in turn subject to the Roman Empire
and the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Empire
under the khalifate. But not until 1t was con-
quered by the Turkish sultan, Selim the Grim, in
1517, did it sink into complete obscurity, like all
the Arab lands incorporated in the Ottoman
Empire. Its existence was almost forgotten until
the very close of the eighteenth century, when it
was suddenly galvanized into life again by two
great soldiers of fortune, neither of them of Asiatic
or African, but both of European stock, and both
born by a curious coincidence in the same year,
1769, in different parts of the Mediterranean—
the Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the

Albanian, Mohamed Al.
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Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt plunged her into
the whirlpool of European strife. But he was much
more than a mere military genius. He took with
him a French scientific mission whose amazing work
during the brief years of the French occupation
revealed Egypt to herself as well as to the Western
World. It was the dawn of a new life for her.

After the British and the Turks had driven
the French out of Egypt, Mohamed Ali, who had
landed with the Turkish Army as a captain of
Albanian auxiliaries, remained and fought his
way to power out of the chaos in which the first
clash of European ambitions on her soil had left
Egypt. He leaped into the saddle as Turkish
governor, and after he had tried his new armies
and ships first on the Wahabis of Arabia and then on
the Greeks of the Morea in revolt against Turkey,
he himself rebelled against his Ottoman overlord
whose Empire he nearly destroyed twice in the
course of a ten-year struggle for independence.
He failed because, with the exception of France,
the European powers, and especially Great Britain,
saw in the independence of Egypt a menace to
their own interests.

Nevertheless, in the end, he secured hereditary
rights of government for himself and his family
and a large measure of autonomy for Egypt,

I 72]DHE PECULIAR, CASE, OF EGYE

while by promoting Western education, by en-
couraging Western trade, by introducing Western
industries, and by opening up communications
between Europe and India through Egypt, though
his methods were often crude and tyrannical, he
laid the rough foundations of modern Egypt.
In many ways a barbarian, who only learned
to read and write in middle age, he had a touch of
genius. He was a Mohammedan, and Turkish
was his mother-tongue, but the strain of European
blood in his veins made him singularly tolerant in
matters of religion and willing to break down
many of the other barriers between East and
West in his adopted country.

After his death in 1849, the contact which he
had established between Egypt and the Occident
continued for the next quarter of a century to be
mainly economic. A large inflow of Europeans,
unfortunately not always of the best type, dis-
covered that there were still abundant fleshpots
in Egypt. The American Civil War gave Egypt
her chance to become a great cotton-growing
country when the rapidly expanding cotton
industries of Europe found themselves suddenly
deprived of their American raw material.

The use of steam power on sea as well as on
land restored Egypt to her ancient position as a

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORTENG

highway between Europe and the more remote
parts of the Orient. But though the construction
of railways between Alexandria and Suez enabled
England to rush troops to India during the
mutiny of 1857, British statesmen entirely failed
at first to recognize the commercial value of the
great scheme revived by the great Frenchman,
Ferdinand de Lesseps, for the construction of a ship
canal between the Mediterranean and the Red
Sea. Mainly from political jealousy of France,
Palmerston fought a long and stubborn fight
against it, but England’s short-sighted opposition
was at last overborne and within a few years of
the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, it proved
to be of greater value to British shipping than to
that of all the other European nations put together
as one of the great arteries of the world’s trade.
But if in Egypt the Orient was being drawn
into such close intercourse with the Occident that
she could be described without much exaggeration
as a “European corner of Africa,” her rulers
were at the same time showing how much easier
it is for Orientals to contract the vices than the
virtues of the Occident. Mohamed Alt’s succes-
sors had not his rugged qualities, and in the
khedive Ismail, who bought that high-sounding
title as well as the right of primogeniture for his

1 74]THE, PECULIAR’ CASE OF EGYED

dynasty from his Turkish overlord with untold
gold, profligate indulgence in the worst foibles of
the West was combined with the worst methods of
Eastern despotism. If he filched from his subjects
fully a quarter of the best lands in the valley of the
Nile, that was merely straining an oriental practice.

It was as a reckless borrower on the European
money markets that he struck out a new and most
dangerous line. The financiers of Paris and
London received him with open arms, for the
credit of the Egyptian state seemed to be ample.
European money poured in, and Ismail spent it
chiefly on his own pleasures, on his palaces,
and his pleasure gardens, on occidental theaters
and oriental harems, on the pomp and circum-
stance of a court which, he: fondly imagined,
rivaled those of European sovereigns, on futile

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armaments and vast schemes of aggrandizement
in Abyssinia and the Sudan. It was the oriental
rake’s progress, and it showed even more clearly
than what was happening at the same time in
Turkey, where his Ottoman overlord was also
borrowing with both hands in the European
money markets, how dangerous for an oriental
state are the facilities which modern financial
methods afford to the boundless extravagance com-
mon to so many oriental rulers.

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There was a limit to the golden eggs which
Egypt could lay. It was soon reached. Her
creditors grew exacting. Ismail mortgaged his
own property as recklessly as that of the state,
if indeed any distinction could really be drawn
between them; he foisted personal bills and
treasury notes upon money-lenders, great and
small, and, unable to meet them, when they fell
due, renewed them on increasingly ruinous terms.
The wretched Egyptian peasant on whose shoulders
the whole burden ultimately rested was bled white.
He was made to pay his taxes for years ahead and
often twice and thrice over; he was forced to sell
his standing crops at derisive prices to the tame
usurer whom the tax-gatherer carried round with
him; he was dragged away in chains from his own
fields to work under the overseer’s whip on the
khedive’s huge personal estates. The end came
in 1879, when Ismail was deposed by the sultan
at the instance of France and England, who at
once introduced a rigid financial control over
Egyptian expenditure in the interests of Egypt
herself no less than of her bondholders abroad.

The misery into which Ismail had plunged the
Egyptian people was intense, and in their despair
they were unable to discriminate either between
the oppression of their own rulers, or the greed

I 76 ]THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT.

of the bondholders in the background, or the
somewhat severe discipline of the foreign adminis-
trators brought in to extricate them from the
morass in which all were floundering. Arabi, the
Egyptian, headed a crude movement of popular
revolt and carried the army with him into open
rebellion against Ismail’s well-meaning son and
successor, the khedive Tewfik. Many elements
contributed to this upheaval, for Western educa-
tion had spread sufficiently in Egypt to produce
an educated or semi-educated class which had
imbibed some occidental conceptions of freedom
together with Europe’s nineteenth-century faith
in the saving principle of nationalism. There
was also, however, a darker background of
Mohammedan fanaticism, and after a murderous
popular outbreak at Alexandria on July 11, 1882,
European intervention became inevitable. But
none of the European powers was keen to bell
the Egyptian cat.

Great Britain ultimately did so after having
vainly endeavored to induce France and Italy and
even Turkey to join her in putting down the Arabi
rebellion. A purely British expedition landed in
Egypt and on September 13 the whole Egyptian
Army was scattered to the winds at the battle
of Tel-el-Kebir; on the following day a British

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Army entered Cairo and has remained there ever
since. The first Egyptian nationalist movement
collapsed like a pricked bubble, but with it also
most of the framework of indigenous government
and administration, already eaten away with dry
rot in Ismail’s days. British ministers found
themselves in an awkward dilemma. They had
repeatedly declared that the occupation would
only be temporary, but they could not evacuate
and leave the country helpless and beggared.
International treaties and French hostility to the
British occupation which had ousted France,
though through her own default, from the privi-
leged position which she had previously shared
with Great Britain, precluded them from cutting
the Gordian knot by the annexation of Egypt
or even by proclaiming a British protectorate.
They shrank from any definite decision and drifted
almost unconsciously and rather reluctantly into
accepting responsibilities never clearly defined, of
which the purpose may be roughly described as
“putting Egypt on her legs again.”

Thus in Egypt the relations between the
Occident and the Orient entered upon a new
phase. Egypt was not incorporated into the
British Empire. She remained, from the point of
view of international law, what she had hitherto

[78 ]THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

been, an autonomous province of the Ottoman
Empire. She retained her dynastic ruler under
a somewhat amorphous constitution with an
Egyptian council of ministers and an Egyptian
administration.

But behind that facade Britain claimed and
exercised the right to give advice and guidance
through her representatives and official. experts,
at first few in number and very carefully selected,
and to insist upon their being accepted and
followed by the Egyptians. This peculiar system
came to be described as the “British control.”
It was a difficult system to work, but in Sir
Evelyn Baring, afterward Lord Cromer, England
found a quite exceptional man, perhaps the only
man, to work it. He worked it for a quarter of a
century so successfully that when he retired in
1907 he had done far more than merely “putting
Egypt on her legs again.” I cannot do better
than quote the language which he himself used
in his farewell speech to defend British control
against the charge that, while having done great
things for the material advancement of Egypt,
it had done little for the intellectual or moral
improvement of her people. He asked:

What! Has there been no moral advancement? Is the
country any longer governed, as was formerly the case, ex-

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

clusively by the use of the whip? Is not forced labour a
thing of the past? Has not the accursed institution of slavery
practically ceased to exist? Is it not a fact that every
individual in the country, from the highest to the lowest, is
now equal in the eyes of the law? That thrift has been
encouraged, and that the most humble member of society
can reap the fruits of his own labour and industry; that
justice is no longer bought and sold; that every one is free,
perhaps some would think too free, to express his opinions;
that King Baksheesh has been dethroned from high places
and now only lingers in the purlieus and byways of the
administration; that the fertilising water of the Nile is
distributed impartially to prince and peasant alike; that the
sick man can be tended in a well-equipped hospital; that the
criminal and the lunatic are no longer treated as wild beasts;
that the solidarity of interests between the governors and the
governed has been recognised in theory and in practice; that
every act of the Administration even if at times mistaken—
for no one is infallible—bears the mark of honesty of purpose
and an earnest desire to secure the well-being of the popula-
tion; and further, that the funds, very much reduced in
amount, which are now being taken from the pockets of the
taxpayers, instead of being for the most part spent on useless
palaces and other objects in which they were in no degree
interested, are devoted to purposes which are of real benefit
to the country? If all these and many other points to which
I ¢an not allude do not constitute some moral advancement,
then, of a truth, I do not know what the word morality
implies.

The historian will not find much fault with
Cromer’s language, and he spoke in no boastful

[ 80 ]THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

spirit. The work had certainly not been only his
own, and he had been admirably served by most
of the Englishmen chosen by him as agents of
British control. His, nevertheless, had been the
driving force and above all the great moral force
behind the control. He was a man of exceptional
ability and sober judgment, who possessed a rare
combination of both energy and patience, and,
what is more, his example set up for all Englishmen
in Egypt the highest standard of conduct in
private life as well as in public service.

It was perhaps inevitable that the quality
of British control should have deteriorated after
he left Egypt. There was no one who could
fill his place. But his titular successors encoun-
tered difficulties of which he had only himself
experienced the first beginnings, though he fully
realized that they were bound to grow, for in
five-and-twenty years of undisturbed peace and
restored prosperity a generation had grown up
which knew not Joseph or the days of the oppres-
sion. The Egyptians had forgotten that it was
England who had rescued them from the ruin
which Ismail had wrought, and they began to
resent the slighter restraints inseparable from
foreign tutelage. Resentment was keenly felt
at the growing number of British officials that

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blocked the way to legitimate promotion against
many young Egyptians who, perhaps rightly, con-
sidered themselves deserving.

But it was the spread of Western education and
the atmosphere of freedom created by increasing
intercourse with the West and by the very influence
of the Englishmen in their midst that engendered
among the Egyptian people a new sense of nation-
hood. Cromer himself, as he has told us in his
Modern Egypt, had carefully watched this birth
of Egyptian nationalism, and not without sym-
pathy with its better aspects. For he realized
that British control could only represent a period
of transition leading either to direct British rule
or to the gradual emancipation of Egypt from
foreign leading strings, and to the former alterna-
tive he had always refused to listen. That the
second alternative was the one he contemplated,
though still a long way off, he clearly indicated
when, a couple of years before he left Egypt, he
himself brought into the forefront of official life
an Egyptian of approved faith in the future of
Egyptian nationhood. It was at Lord Cromer’s
instance that Saad Zaghlul Pasha, who in his
youth had been a follower of Arabi and is now
Egyptian prime minister, was appointed minister
of education in 1905, and before leaving Egypt

[ 82 ]THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

two years later he singled him out for exceptionally
high praise.

Under Cromer’s successors the new Egyptian
nationalism continued to grow apace, though by
no means always wisely. The khedive, Abbas
Hilmi, had inherited the despotic and grasping
instincts of some of his forebears. Soon after
his accession in 1892 he had a sharp lesson or two
from Cromer which taught him to keep them under
restraint. But when Cromer had gone he gave
freer vent to his hatred of British control in the
very things in which he stood in greatest need
of it, and in his intrigues to free himself from it
for his own ambitious purposes he knew how to
exploit the impatience of some of the nationalist
leaders to whom on other grounds British control
was equally irksome. Hence many tares as well
as good wheat grew up in the enlarging field of
Egyptian nationalism.

The British government had, however, defi-
nitely pronounced after Cromer’s retirement in
favor of the progressive policy initiated by him
with the inclusion of Zaghlul Pasha in the Egyptian
cabinet. In 1908 local self-government was ex-
tended “‘as the best preparation and education
for the ultimate exercise of more responsible
functions.” In 1913 a new organic statute was

[ 83 ]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

drawn up under the advice of Lord Kitchener,
who was then British representative in Cairo.
It provided for the creation of a legislative
assembly of a genuinely representative character
and with something of the powers of a real parlia-
ment, and Zaghlul Pasha who had resigned from
the cabinet owing to differences with the khedive
in which he had not received from Kitchener
the support he expected, was elected by the
nationalist majority to be its non-official vice-
president. These constitutional changes did not,
however, satisfy the advanced nationalists, while
they were at least as distasteful to the khedive,
who aimed at a great deal more than the position
of a merely constitutional ruler. But their value
had not been thoroughly tested when the Great
War broke out in 1914 and the whole. world,
including Egypt, was thrown into the melting-pot.

The fiction—for it had become little more—of
Turkish sovereignty over Egypt became untenable
when Turkey entered into the Great War three
months after its outbreak as the ally of Germany
and Austria, and the khedive, Abbas, who was
spending the summer as he often did in Constanti-
nople, threw in his lot with her. Great Britain
might have taken the opportunity to annex Egypt
as a province of the Ottoman Empire with which

1 84 }THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

she was at war. That solution was considered in
London, but was rejected in view of the agreement
between the Allies to refrain from any final
decisions as to the future of conquered territories
until the end of the war. But because, among
other reasons, the Egyptians had to be given
some temporary status to take the place of their
former Ottoman status, a British protectorate
was proclaimed and a new ruler was installed
with the higher title of sultan in the person of
Prince Hussein, then the eldest surviving son of
the khedive Ismail, who was generally well liked
and respected throughout the country. The dy-
nasty was thus preserved and the same Egyptian
ministers, who stood loyally by England through-
out the war, continued in office.

But Egypt, placed under. martial law, became
a great military camp as the most convenient base
for operations against Turkey. The Egyptian
government placed all the resources of the country
at Britain’s disposal. The premature death in
October, 1917, of the first sultan of Egypt, and
the appointment in his place of Prince Fuad,
the youngest son of Ismail, whom many Egyptians
suspect of having unfortunately inherited his
father’s least estimable qualities, passed almost
unnoticed amid the growing preoccupations of

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the world-war. Whatever may have been the
secret sympathies of the masses, who had no
love for the Turk but were his brothers in the
faith, internal tranquillity was never once seriously
disturbed during the war. The Egyptian nationalist
leaders, however, were never taken into British
confidence, though a suggestion once came from
Cairo, but was rejected in London, that Zaghlul
should be invited to join the Egyptian cabinet.
The nationalists kept their own counsel, but took
careful note of the frequent declarations of allied
statesmen that they were fighting for the freedom
of all nations, small as well as great, and welcomed,
above all, President Wilson’s apostolic pronounce-
ment in favor of self-determination.

Two days after the Armistice, Zaghlul Pasha
and some of his political friends called upon the
British high commissioner and claimed full and
complete independence for the Egyptian people
in accordance with the principles laid down by the
spokesmen of the Allied and Associated Powers.
Their claim was ignored, and while they addressed
frantic appeals to President Wilson and the big
five in Paris, they started a raging and tearing
propaganda which spread like wildfire over the
country. For if Egypt was richer by some
£200,000,000 of English money spent there during

[ 86 IHH PECULIAR CASE OR EGET

the war, much of that wealth had accrued merely
to a few classes, and the masses had undoubtedly
suffered grave hardships during its later stages
when recruitment for labor corps on military
railways and the collection of supplies in kind for
army transport and for the maintenance of the
British expeditionary forces at the front were
often carried out very ruthlessly under the pressure
of military necessity, though in 1914 the British
authorities in Cairo had publicly declared that
Egypt would not be called upon to bear any of the
burdens of the war. For all those hardships
the presence of the British in Egypt and a war
waged by them ultimately far beyond the frontiers
of Egypt were held alone responsible, though
much of the trouble had been caused by subordi-
nate native officials who seized the opportunity
to fill their pockets and satisfy personal grudges.

Zaghlul had therefore the inarticulate masses
as well as the politically minded classes behind
him when he inveighed against the continuance
of an oppressive alien tutelage. Egyptian minis-
ters were alarmed, and they requested to be allowed
to confer directly with the British government in
London. This very reasonable suggestion was
dismissed as inopportune, and the Egyptian
cabinet resigned. British ministers, busy with

{ 87 |oe en co At li 7

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

the Paris Peace Conference, were too much
preoccupied with the situation in Europe to
realize how grave was the situation in Egypt.
The agitation there grew red-hot, and the British
military authorities set the spark to the train by
arresting Zaghlul and three of his chief supporters
and deporting them to Malta. Within a few
days the whole of the country was in a blaze of
revolt. Railways, telegraphs, and telephones were
destroyed, and, besides arson and plunder and
promiscuous rioting, some horrible outrages were
perpetrated on isolated British ‘soldiers and civil-
ians. Nor were Europeans of other nationalities
safe. At one moment Cairo was cut off from all
communication with the outside world except
by aeroplane. But the British had plenty of
troops in Egypt, and as soon as flying columns
could be organized to quell the insurrection, it
collapsed completely.

Active resistance had almost ceased when
Lord Allenby, the conqueror of Syria, who hap-
pened at the time to be attending the Paris Peace
Conference, was sent back posthaste to Egypt as
British high commissioner. Armed rebellion was
over, but he was still confronted with a prolonged
campaign of passive resistance in the shape of
political strikes which were just as much directed

[ 88 ]DEE, PECULIAR (CASE Ob EGYET

against the British protectorate when the strikers
were merely humble municipal scavengers or rail-
waymen or postmen as when they were mem-
bers of the bar or of the higher staff of the chief
public departments.

There was still no Egyptian government, and
no Egyptian could be found to form one until
the British government agreed to release Zaghlul
and the other Malta deportees. They were not,
however, allowed to return to Egypt but were
landed in France, where they installed themselves
in Paris. There they continued to conduct their
agitation for Egyptian independence almost as
effectively as from Cairo, where they, mean-
while, controlled a great political organization,
and they sent their own deputations abroad to
plead their cause with the Allied and Associated
Powers, and not least forcibly in Washington.

The British government very tardily realized
that something had to be done, but, as usual in
most emergencies when government is in search
of a policy, that “‘something” did not go beyond
the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry.
It was to go out and investigate the causes of the
recent troubles, and it was also to make recom-
mendations for placing the relations between
England and Egypt on a more satisfactory footing

{ 89 ]aeration

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by the grant of a generous measure of self-govern-
ment, but without prejudice to the protectorate
which was then for the first time receiving the
imprimatur of international recognition in the
Treaty of Versailles. It was a strong Commission,
presided over by Lord Milner, a member of the
British cabinet and one of Lord Cromer’s ablest
lieutenants in the first decade of British control.
But, unfortunately, seven or eight months elapsed
before it landed in Egypt in December, 1919.

By that time the agitation for complete inde-
pendence had been resumed with fresh vigor.
In nothing have the Egyptians, and indeed most
Orientals who have been brought into contact
with the Occident, shown themselves more adept
pupils than in the art of political agitation. Before
the Commission arrived public meetings at which
the bar was conspicuous were held to denounce
the Commission, and as the Egyptian legisla-
ture was closed, its members held informal but
well-advertised gatherings, and adjured the coun-
try to have nothing to do with the accursed
thing.

The Omdehs, or village headmen, who have
always wielded considerable influence in the rural
districts, telegraphed their indignant protest to
Zaghlul in Paris, who replied with a message of

I 90 }er

THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

warm encouragement and approval. Notables
and Ulema, the leaders of Mohammedan opinion,
even the princes of the reigning dynasty, followed
suit, and the students of the government colleges
as well as of the great Mohammedan University
of El Azhar in Cairo, the boys in the secondary
and primary schools, and even the girls’ schools,
in which the limit of age is between five and eleven
years, went on strike and promenaded the streets
to swell the boycott chorus and cry shame upon
the protectorate.

In Cairo and in Alexandria there were street
demonstrations on a large scale, frequently ending
in violent rioting as they always attracted a large
tail of rabble out for any mischief that might be
going. When that mischief assumed the shape
of looting Greek and Jewish shops and attacking
harmless foreigners, British troops had to be sent
in to reinforce the Egyptian police, and on
November 16, close to the sultan’s palace in Cairo,
a mob attacked and set fire to a couple of police
stations, and held its ground so fiercely that nearly
a hundred rioters were killed and wounded before
order could be restored.

It was in this explosive atmosphere that Lord
Milner’s Commission landed in Egypt in
December, 1919. But in spite of the boycott its

{ 91 ]

 

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

members carried on their work in Cairo and in the
provinces, though sometimes not without dis-
agreeable incidents. Some of them had many old
friends in Egypt, and there were a number of
representative Egyptians who were willing enough
to see them privately. But the Commission
needed no close investigation to gauge the state
of the country when bombs were thrown in open
daylight and in frequented thoroughfares on
Egyptian ministers suspected of lukewarmness on
the question of full and immediate independence.
The pre-war system of British control had clearly
broken down and could never be restored on
pre-war lines. The relations between England
and Egypt would have to be placed on a new
basis of mutual consent if Egypt was to be saved
from the demoralizing consequences of a lawless
agitation, and if England was to remain faithful
to her own liberal traditions and redeem the
promises she had repeatedly given to the Egyptian
people. One strong argument against the uncon-
ditional recognition of Egyptian independence
was that Egypt could not yet hope to uphold it
without British support against possible foreign
ageression.

But the protectorate, at any rate, would have
to go by the board, for its very name, which in its

[ 92 ]THE, PECULIAR: CASE, Ob EGYRE

Arabic form connoted a humiliating status of
inferiority, had come to stink in the nostrils of all
Egyptians, who, moreover, professed never to have
accepted it as anything but a war measure. If Great
Britain, to whom Egypt owed her release from
Turkish sovereignty, was entitled to claim definite
safeguards for her special interests in the country
and for those of the large foreign communities
who looked to her to protect them, they would
have to be embodied in a bilateral treaty in return
for Britain’s acknowledgment of Egyptian inde-
pendence.

These were roughly the conclusions at which
the Commission arrived when it left Egypt three
months later, and Lord Milner felt that, if an
agreement was to be worked out on those lines,
it was essential for him to establish contact with
Zaghlul himself, who still substantially controlled
the situation from his hotel in Paris. This was
achieved through the good offices of Adly Pasha,
a moderate Egyptian statesman from whom the
Commission had received a great deal of help in
Cairo. The result of their meeting in Paris
was that Zaghlul agreed to follow Milner to London
and continue their conversations there. Together,
after long but friendly discussions, they finally
outlined an agreement acceptable to both parties

[ 93 |ere

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as the basis for a formal treaty of alliance between
Great Britain and Egypt.

The terms leaked out prematurely, but on the
whole they were favorably received in both
countries. Lord Milner’s Commission then pro-
ceeded to complete its report, which was laid
before Parliament. It concluded with the follow-
ing weighty recommendation:

We therefore strongly advise His Majesty’s Government
to enter without undue delay into negotiations with the
Egyptian Government for the conclusion of a treaty on the
lines which we have ventured to recommend. It would, in
our opinion, be a great misfortune if the present opportunity
was lost.

That statesman-like document marked an
important stage, not merely in Anglo-Egyptian
relations, but in the readjustment of the wider
relations between the Occident and the Orient.
It recognized that in Egypt at least the Orient had
gone far to establish its claim to be treated on a
footing of equality. Whether or not the Egyptians
were really yet fitted for self-government, the
experiment could no longer be postponed without
going back on the principles of British policy which
shrank more and more from a resort to violence
for the mere purpose of maintaining an alien
people in continued subjection.

I 94 |THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

A new cabinet was constituted in Egypt under
Adly Pasha, who had first brought Zaghlul and
Milner together, and it was avowedly constituted
in order to carry on negotiations with the British
government on the lines of the Milner Commis-
sion’s report. But when Adly arrived in London
he was soon disillusioned. When he called’ on
Lloyd George, the British prime minister, profess-
ing to ignore the Egyptian demand for independ-
ence, pointed dramatically to a chair in the
Imperial Conference room which he invited Egypt
to occupy as a valued member of the British
commonwealth of nations. Utterly ignorant of
the Orient, he had listened to the voice of the
tempter, Winston Churchill, who, though he
called himself a Liberal, had always remained
at heart much more reactionary than many of
the Conservative party to which he originally be-
longed. He cared nothing for Lord Milner’s rec-
ommendations. The one aspect of the Egyptian
question, as he saw it, was its strategical aspect,
and under his inspiration negotiations centered
upon the nature and extent of the military hold
which Britain should retain upon Egypt. While
Adly was disposed to accept the retention in
Egypt of a small British force as before the war,
but wished it to be transferred from Cairo to

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some locality near the Suez Canal, and with a
special view to its protection, Churchill was
determined not only to keep a garrison in the
capital but to bind Egypt down to a formal and
unreserved recognition of British rights of military
occupation wherever the British government
pleased and for however long, going thereby far
beyond anything demanded of her before the
war.

The London negotiations might have broken
down on other points, but it was on this point
that they actually broke down in November,
1921. Adly returned to Egypt and he and his
colleagues resigned, and when the British govern-
ment followed up the rupture of the negotiations
with a note which in effect implied a reversion to
a policy of domination, events at once bore out
the wisdom of the Milner Commission’s warning.
Fresh disturbances broke out and Zaghlul was
once more deported with a number of his followers.

Order was restored, but England had laid
herself open to a charge of bad faith, and not only
her Egyptian friends, but her own people in
Egypt, were driven to despair. The four principal
British officials who, as advisers, were still to
some extent responsible for Egyptian administra-
tion in the important departments of the interior,

[ 96 }THE PECULIAR CASE OR EGYER

finance, education, and justice, addressed a
remarkable memorandum to Lord Allenby express-
ing their unanimous opinion that any decision
which did not admit the principle of Egyptian
independence, and which forcibly maintained the
protectorate, must entail serious risk of revolution
throughout the country, and would in any case
produce complete administrative chaos, rendering
government impossible. The whole structure of
government was Egyptian, and British control
could not possibly, they contended, be exercised
without full Egyptian co-operation in all branches
of administration, as it had been proved in the
spring of Ig1g when an attempt had been made
to carry on the government without a ministry
and with a large proportion of Egyptian officials
on strike.

Lord Allenby himself, to the dismay of the
British government, indorsed those views, and,
when he was sent for to London, told Lloyd
George to his face that he would have to decline
to bear responsibility for a policy which could
only be carried through with a large British army
behind it. Lloyd George seldom held out against
anyone who stood up to him, and within a few
days, while boldly maintaining that British policy
in Egypt remained unchanged, made a new

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“declaration of principles” (February 28, 1922)
to the effect that the British protectorate over
Egypt was terminated; that Egypt was declared
to be an independent, sovereign state; and that
martial law should be withdrawn as soon as an
act of indemnity had been passed by the Egyptian
government. He merely added that, pending the
conclusion “by free discussion and friendly
accommodation”’ of agreements concerning the
security of the communications of the British
Empire in Egypt, the defense of Egypt against
all foreign aggression and interference, the protec-
tion of foreign interests and of minorities in Egypt,
and, finally, the Sudan, His Majesty’s government
reserved these matters to their own discretion,
the status quo remaining intact in regard to them.

These “principles” were practically those of
the Milner report, with this tremendous difference,
however, that the latter proposed to have them
set forth in a bilateral treaty by which Egypt
would have simultaneously contracted binding
obligations in regard to the points which Lloyd
George airily remitted to future negotiations,
without in the meantime securing anything in the
shape of binding obligations from Egypt.

Since then Egypt has been recognized by
Great Britain as a free and independent sovereign

1 98 JTHES PECURTAR: CASE) OF EGYEt

state. King Fuad has assumed the royal title
and appointed his own diplomatic representatives
abroad, a new Egyptian constitution has been
enacted, martial law has ceased, general elections
have been held, and Zaghlul has not only returned
to Egypt, but is now prime minister with a huge
majority behind him in the new Parliament.

On the other hand, the points reserved by
Lloyd George for future negotiations are no nearer
a settlement. A small British force is still
stationed in Cairo and Alexandria, and Egypt
has become if anything a more important base
than ever for British military aviation, while at
the last Imperial Conference the British domin-
ions laid renewed stress upon the necessity of
safeguarding the Empire’s line of maritime com-
munications through the Suez Canal. Things
have been complicated also by the entire surrender
to Turkey, under the Lausanne Treaty, of the
capitulations which constituted throughout the
whole Ottoman Empire the only final guaranty for
the material interests of foreign residents of all
nationalities. It has become much more difficult
to insist upon the maintenance of the same system
in Egypt where justice has at any rate long since
ceased to be the mere byword it has always been

in Turkey.

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It is, I may remark in passing, one of the
anomalies of the Egyptian situation that the
whole economic life of the country is controlled
by foreigners, not only or chiefly Englishmen, but
Frenchmen, Italians, Greeks, and many other
nationalities, including before the war large
numbers of Germans and Austrians who will soon
be returning there. For while the Egyptians have
responded to Western education in many of the
liberal professions, and have often become efficient
administrators as well as skilful adepts in the
political arts of the West, they have always kept
entirely aloof from the higher walks of commerce
and industry and finance. They have left it to
the foreigner to develop the great natural resources
of their country, and while his brains have devel-
oped its material prosperity, his example has
encouraged a taste for all the luxuries and amenities
of life unknown to former Egyptian generations.

The Egyptians may well have grown impatient
of the restraints imposed upon them by the ancient
system of capitulations under which every large
foreign settlement in their midst enjoys a privileged
position under its own consular jurisdiction, and
has almost become an imperium in imperio,
since even in the matter of taxation the hands of
the Egyptian government are tied up in a network

{| 100 }THE PECULIAR CASE OF EGYPT

of treaties which cannot be modified without the
consent of some seventeen or eighteen foreign
powers. In this matter England is not even free
to deal with the Egyptian government on her
own account alone and independently of other
foreign powers toward whom she incurred implicit
if not explicit responsibilities when she assumed
sole control over the Egyptian government and
administration.

On many points one may sympathize with the
demands which Egypt has now raised under altered
conditions, but Zaghlul appears unhappily resolved
to place in the forefront of Egyptian demands the
very worst one of all, namely, the recovery of
Egypt’s full rights of sovereignty over the Sudan.
For, on the same principle of self-determination on
which the Egyptians have based their claim to
independence, the people of the Sudan have the
right to reject Egyptian rule and do emphatically
reject it.

Mohamed Ali conquered the Sudan for Egypt
a hundred years ago, and Egypt so misruled it
for over fifty years that the Sudanese responded
at once to the call of the able if fanatical leader
who in the early eighties drove the Egyptians
out with great slaughter. The Mahdi, it is true,
himself in turn chastised them with scorpions,

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and Kitchener was hailed as a deliverer when,
in 1898, he reconquered Khartum, where Gordon
had died in 1884, like the great Christian hero
that he was, in a vain attempt to stem the deso-
lating tide of Mahdism. Since then, in recognition
of Egypt’s financial and military contribution to
the reconquest of the Sudan, the Egyptian flag
has been flown side by side with the British flag
as an emblem of joint sovereignty, but the adminis-
tration of the country has been wholly in British
hands and has restored to the country a marvelous
degree of prosperity when one remembers that
under the Mahdi’s barbarous despotism its popu-
lation was reduced in some fifteen years from
8,000,000 to a little over 2,000,000 people.

All that the Egyptians can rightfully demand
is that nothing shall be done in the Sudan to
curtail the flow of water from the Blue and White
Nile on which Egyptian irrigation, i.e., the life
of Egypt, depends. For this, ample guaranties
will not be refused them. But England cannot
consent to hand over the Sudanese to the
Egyptians, whom they hate and despise, and who
could never enforce their rule on a much more
warlike race, much better equipped today than
it ever was before for resistance. Unless Egypt
is prepared to yield on that point it is difficult

[ 102 |tHE, PECULIAR CASH OF EGYPT

to see how Zaghlul can hope to succeed in the
negotiations for which he has been invited to
London, and if these negotiations break down
one does not know where to look for the possibility
of an accommodation of which many patriotic
Egyptians and sensible Englishmen alike admit
the urgency.

For the Egyptian has not yet put off the old
Adam. With the relaxation of British control,
nepotism and corruption, never wholly exorcised,
are again creeping into the public services, and
the mere withdrawal of the European expert's
hand from the administration of the state railways
has already caused general and not unwarranted
alarm. ‘The harm done to the rising generation
by the introduction of political agitation into
schools and colleges cannot be easily repaired.
The machinery of parliamentary government has
yet to be tested by experience, even if an Egyptian
minister as popular as Zaghlul can hold his own
against King Fuad, who is scarcely of the stuff
of which constitutional rulers are made. He takes
far too much after his father, Khedive Ismail,
of whose autocratic instincts he has inherited a
goodly share. He is adroit and knows how to
bend people of all classes to his will, and even
how to gain the plaudits of the crowd, though,

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when he returned to Egypt a grown man after
having accompanied his father into exile and
having been educated almost entirely in Italy,
he could neither speak Arabic properly nor go
through without careful prompting the complicated
ritual of Mohammedan worship.

Western civilization is certainly something
more than a mere veneer in Egypt, but the masses,
too easy-going as a rule to be aggressively infoler-
ant, are still apt to be swayed by sudden gusts of
Mohammedan fanaticism, and the great Egyptian
University of El Azhar, still steeped in Moham-
medan medievalism, turns out every year a
larger number of students than any of the modern
government colleges. El Azhar has sent out to
the Mohammedans all over the world an invitation
for a conference to be held next year on the future
of the khalifate. It may never be held, and, if
held, it may fail to promote unity. Considering
what are King Fuad’s idiosyncracies, it would be
the crowning paradox in the land of paradoxes
if he were chosen as the successor to the Turkish
khalif whom the men of Angora have dethroned.
While it would bring the khalifate into much
closer contact than it ever was at Constantinople
with the modern Occident, it might equally well
serve to strengthen the reactionary forces in

[ 104 }THE PE CULTAR CASE OFFEGYEA

Egypt and imperil the equilibrium, none too stable
already, between the Occident and the Orient
which the more progressive Egyptians claim to
have achieved.

But I do not wish to lay excessive stress on the
disturbing features of the Egyptian situation.
There are brighter sides to the picture. The
Egyptians have become more of a nation than any-
one would have believed possible a half-century
ago. Nationalism has not been a vain word with
them, for it has done a great deal to draw together
the Mohammedan majority and the Coptic
Christian minority of the population. Though
they may seem to us to be trying to run before
they can walk, careless of the pitfalls with which
their adventure as an independent and sovereign
country is beset, they are at any rate looking
forward, and not backward to a mythical past.
They may find the task of governing themselves
more difficult than they imagine, but they base
their claim to make the attempt on a principle
which the Occident cannot deny, namely, that
it is through freedom and the exercise of independ-
ent responsibility that nations can in the long run
alone learn to govern themselves. If they succeed,
England will be able to claim some share of credit
for herself, for it is she who will have given the

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Egyptians their chance in the modern world,
first, by ending the old system of indigenous
despotism which had brought them near to ruin,
and then by voluntarily releasing them from her
own tutelage to which they owe whatever fitness
they now possess for democratic freedom.

{ 106 J‘ i
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THE GREAT BRITISH EXPERIMENT
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IN INDIA

Nature herself seems to have set India apart
as a unique field for such a unique experiment
as the government of 300,000,000 Asiatics of
different races and creeds and languages by a
small and remote island kingdom of the Occident.

A vast lozenge-shaped projection from the
great continent of Asia, inclosed within stupendous
mountain ranges on its northern land frontier,
and everywhere else by the wide, encircling ocean,
and inhabited by a multitude of peoples in various
stages of social development, India had no direct
contact with the Occident after Alexander the
Great’s meteoric invasion, third century B.c.,
which only reached to the Indus, until the frst
landing of the Portuguese in 1498, when they
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and discovered a
new highway from Europe across hitherto un-
traveled seas. Another century passed before
the English followed in the wake of the
Portuguese. On the last day of the year 1600,

[| 109 |THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

near the end of her reign, Queen Elizabeth granted
to a “company of merchants of London trading
in the East Indies” a charter out of which grew up
the most powerful trading corporation known in
history as the Honourable East India Company,
and finally, the great British Empire of India.

If time allowed, I should like to show you
how British power beyond the seas was built up
simultaneously during the next two centuries
in India and in America. In such very different
fields the attempt naturally worked out on very
different lines and with very different results,
though in both cases there was at first a similar
purpose of commercial enterprise only. In North
America the British found almost empty coast-
lands not entirely unlike their own in climate
and natural surroundings, ready to be peopled
and developed by men and women of their own
race who made their homes there and founded
sturdy communities resolved to preserve the habits
and traditions and even the institutions of the
old country. In India, on the contrary, the
British found an immense and populous sub-
continent with powerful rulers and an ancient
civilization as strange to them as its fierce sunshine
and tropical vegetation. Only in the prime of life
could they withstand its oppressive climate, and

{ 110 ]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

they were content to secure by agreement with its
local rulers a precarious foothold at a few isolated
points on the far-flung coast for the establishment
of small settlements or “factories,” as they were
then called, which they never regarded as their
permanent homes.

On the Coromandel coast at Madras, on the
Arabian Sea at Surat, and later on at Bombay
and in the Bay of Bengal where Calcutta ultimately
erew up, they slowly but steadily prospered as
traders, and mainly because, unlike the Portuguese
who had been ruthless both as conquerors and
missionaries, they had made it their rule not to
meddle with the religious and social customs of
the natives, and avoided all interference in the
internal affairs of the country, where the great
Moghul Empire was at that time the undisputed
paramount power. Their chief troubles at first
were not in India itself, but at home, with the
vacillating policies of kings and ministers and the
intrigues of rival trading interests, while they
had to reckon with the competition, by no means
always peaceful, of other European nations equally
bent upon securing for themselves new markets
beyond the seas.

In the development of their trading settlements
in India, just as in the consolidation of their

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colonies in North America, the British had to
fight in turn the same European rivals. The
Portuguese power in India was rapidly decaying
before the British made their appearance on the
scene, but the Dutch traders who had got ahead
of them were at least as enterprising as the
British, and, for some time more vigorously
supported by their own government at home,
they had larger resources, both financial and naval,
at their backs. Protracted and often unofficial
warfare, conducted mainly on the eastern seas
between Dutch and British, and often while the
two nations were themselves at peace in Europe,
ended in the withdrawal of the Dutch to the
East Indian Archipelago where they remained
and are still firmly established.

No sooner had the Dutch retired than the
French entered the lists as still more formidable
rivals. Events followed much the same course in
North America where New York was first of all
New Amsterdam, and, when the Dutch had been
ejected, a far more obstinate struggle was fought
out between England and France for the mastery
of the North American continent. In India,
likewise, as soon as the Moghul Empire began to
disintegrate, the question that arose was whether
British or French ascendancy should prevail. It

{ 112 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

remained for a long time in the balance, and the
genius of Dupleix might have turned it in favor
of France had he not been sacrificed to the greed
and sordid intrigues of the French court in the
worst days of Louis XV. The issue of that duel
between France and England was finally settled
mainly by the superiority of British naval power.

Two locally decisive land battles were fought
almost at the same time in North America and
in India, namely, the battle of Plassey in 1757,
which led straight to British dominion in India, and
the battle of Quebec, which shattered French
dominion in North America. To make the parallel
more complete, the obstinacy and short-sightedness
of a British king was one at least of the many
causes that ultimately led to the loss of the old
British colonies in America just as the corruption
and incompetence of the French court had
already destroyed the promise of a French empire
in India. Thus it came to pass that almost
at the same time as with the American War of
Independence Britain ceased to be the dominant
power in North America, she became the dominant
power in India. For, after many vicissitudes and
much jealousy and opposition at home, the East
India Company had grown so powerful in London
and British trade with the East had become so

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great a national asset that when they were vitally
threatened by the state of anarchy which had
spread over India with the decay of the Moghul
power and by the competitive ambitions of France
who was England’s great rival in Europe, the East
India Company had been at last driven to depart
from its settled policy of non-intervention in
Indian quarrels and the British government in
like manner compelled to stand by the East India
Company.

The British entered, as did the French, into
local alliances with rival Indian potentates, and,
following the French example, raised and organized
native armies with European officers and equip-
ment and discipline to fight their battles. These
were in turn reinforced by fleets and armies sent
out from England and France, and when the
French ultimately gave up the contest, the
British were so firmly anchored in India, not only
by their material interests, but by the engagements
into which they had entered with many of the
peoples and princes of India, that they were almost
unavoidably constrained to assume the full respon-
sibilities of rulership as the one governing power
that could save India from floundering in chaos.

But my purpose is not to describe the gradual
expansion of British dominion over the whole of

1 114 ]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

India, from Cape Comorin, only a few degrees
north of the Equator, to the Himalayan Roof of
the World, but to focus your attention on the
peculiar relationship between the Occident and the
Orient which has arisen out of British rule in India.

I would ask you, however, to bear in mind
that, until British rule, India had only on rare
occasions and for relatively short periods, attained
to political unity, and still less to a sense of national
unity. For from the dawn of history we find the
peoples of India with their various quite distinct
races and languages almost always split up into
a vast number of kingdoms and confederacies con-
stantly at war with one another.

Even the great Moghul Empire, to which the
British Indian Empire may be said to have suc-
ceeded, was in no sense a national Indian empire,
nor was its authority ever established over the
whole peninsula. The Moghuls were the last of a
long succession of Mohammedan conquerors who
had poured down from Central Asia through the
mountain passes of northern India, and built
up their power on the ruins of earlier Hindu states.
The Moghuls were originally in race and in religion
just as much aliens in India as the British, and
they subdued India by the sword alone. Their

system of government was a masterful, but under

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some of their greatest emperors such as Akbar,
a not unenlightened despotism. Though for rea-
sons of policy they converted only a portion of
the population to their Mohammedan creed,
those conversions were largely effected by force,
and the Hindus were seldom allowed to forget
that Islam was the dominant faith throughout
the land.

I would also remind you that to the present
day, one-third of the area of India and one-
quarter of its population is subject only to British
overlordship without any rights of internal admin-
istration, and that overlordship is conditioned on
ancient treaties of alliance under which the
hereditary rulers of what are called the “native
states” of India—some of them almost as large
as the minor states of Europe—retain all their
autonomous rights of government and administra-
tion, the British government of India controlling
only their foreign relations and matters of all
Indian interest, ports, railways, etc. Most of
the native states themselves sought this form of
British protection against the political anarchy
which threatened to overwhelm them when the
Moghul Empire fell to pieces through the weakness
and corruption and incompetence of its later
rulers. British rule was never established through-

{ 116 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

out India by the sword alone, but by the promise
of law and order which India was looking for in
vain elsewhere at one of the great crises in her
history.

The magnitude of the responsibilities which
devolved upon the East India Company when,
in the second half of the eighteenth century, it
found itself, through the sheer force of circum-
stances rather than through any deliberately pre-
conceived design, transformed from a mere trading
corporation into a great agency of government
and administration, was at first only imperfectly
apprehended in England. Clive, the victor of
Plassey, was the first to recognize that such vast
responsibilities could not be properly discharged
by a trading company, and he urged the British
government to assume without delay full sover-
eignty over all the British possessions in India.

But public opinion at home was not yet ripe
for such a change, and only after the scandals of
misrule and corruption among officers of the
company in Bengal had alarmed the better
conscience of England was the British government
moved to assume very real responsibility by bring-
ing under its direct control the company’s Board
of Directors in London and its chief agents in

India. The American War of Independence had
[117]THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

taught England a costly lesson in statesmanship,
and no sooner was it brought to an end by the
recognition of the independence of the United
States of America than Pitt’s Government of India
Act of 1784 laid down a new and far-reaching
principle for the future governance of British
India—the principle of trusteeship, to be carried
into practice by Englishmen on the spot but under
the supervision and responsibility of the British
Parliament.

Dominion over alien races was for the first
time recognized to involve a great moral obligation
toward them. Their interests, and not those
merely of their alien rulers, were to be a principal
consideration. The rulers were to regard them-
selves as trustees for those over whom they ruled.

It is a principle which in our own times has been

at least formally accepted by all Western nations
who hold dominion over alien races, and it has
been consecrated under a new form by the Cove-
nant of the League of Nations. But to Pitt be-
longs the credit of having been the first to use the
word “‘trust”’ in this connection, and the man who
prevailed upon him to use it was Wilberforce, to
whom more than to any other single individual
the world was to owe the abolition of the slave
trade.

[ 1184]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

The East India Company set its house in
order and organized great public services which,
whatever their other shortcomings, have main-
tained to the present day the highest possible
standards of integrity and even-handed justice.
Nor were British administrators concerned merely
to establish the rule of law in the vast territories
committed to their care. They began to look
forward. Exactly one hundred years ago, in
1824, one of the greatest of them, Sir Thomas
Munro, then governor of Madras, boldly raised
the whole question of England’s mission in India.
Her duty, he declared, was “to train Indians to
govern and protect themselves.” It was a far-
reaching pronouncement, and though Munro was
in advance of his times, he gave a new orientation
to British statesmanship.

The first step clearly was to give India the same
education which had trained the British people
to self-government and self-protection. The at-
mosphere at home was favorable, and under the
same liberal impulse that had carried the great
Reform Bill of 1832 in England, the famous
minute drafted by Macaulay in 1833, while he
held high legal office in Calcutta, finally committed
the British rulers of India to the introduction of
Western education. It was a tremendous experi-

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ment, for it meant nothing less than taking the
peoples of India into partnership with Western
civilization, and the gulf between it and their
own ancient civilization was profound.

India’s civilization is bound up with Hinduism,
which is a great social as well as religious system.
As a religion it is singularly elastic, ranging from
the gross idol-worship of the masses to the most
subtle conceptions of pantheism and even atheism,
which have been elaborated in the course of
centuries by Indian philosophers out of the
primitive mythology of the sacred Vedas. As a
social system, however, Hinduism is the most
rigid that the world has ever seen, for it is based
on the bed rock of caste which governs life not only
from birth to death, but through an endless
cycle of rebirths from death to life again. Nothing
can be more utterly opposed to the sturdy indi-
vidualism which has been hitherto the bed rock
of Western civilization. For under the Hindu caste
system every Hindu is born into a particular social
eroup of which the laws govern every incident of his
life, prescribing minutely those whom he may marry
and eat with and converse with and the daily ritual
which he must perform and the manner in which
he must be buried, his inheritance distributed, and
the continuity of ancestral worship preserved.

{ 120 }

eeTHE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

At the apex of the caste system stands the
Brahmanical caste, semi-divine in origin, invested
with exclusive spiritual authority, and below it
a long gradation of other castes reaching in a
descending scale down to millions of human beings
who are regarded as outside the pale and treated
as untouchable, 1.e., that social and physical
contact with them is deemed to constitute religious
pollution. Considering how strong the racial
feeling is today in India against the British as
the ruling white race, it is as well to note that the
Sanskrit word for caste means “color,” and, as
the early invaders of India who came down
from Central Asia in prehistoric times were
Aryans of a lighter complexion than the popula-
tions commonly called Dravidian whom they
subdued, it may be reasonably inferred that the
caste system was primarily developed by the
Aryan Brahmans in order to preserve the prestige
and purity of the conquering race. The Aryan
Brahmans were, in fact, the ruling “white race”
of those remote ages, and their purpose, though not
their methods, was precisely the same as that of
the white race today seeking to maintain its
superiority over the colored races of the world.

Nowadays the spread of Western education
and the everyday exigencies of modern life have

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led to some relaxation of caste observances, but
still almost only in non-essentials, and in a large
part of rural India, especially in the south, they
have lost very little of their rigidity. I have
myself seen a Brahman judge on circuit in a
native state of southern India holding his court in
the open, outside a village of low-caste untouch-
ables, and, as both the plaintiff and the defendant
were untouchables, the laws of caste compelled
them to stand at such a distance from the Brahman
judge in order not to pollute him by undue
proximity to his person, that their statements,
and those of many witnesses also, had, like his
questions, to be carried to and fro by ushers of
intermediate castes within a lessening range of
pollution. Even today there are many village
schools in which boys belonging to the lower castes
have to sit. apart on the veranda just. outside
the schoolroom and pick up what they can of the
lesson given by the Brahman teacher to the higher-
caste boys inside the schoolroom who would not
be allowed by their parents to attend if they had to
rub shoulders with their lower-caste school-fellows.

Another puzzling feature is that superiority
of caste does not by any means always correspond
with superiority of what we call worldly position.
Brahmans often pursue very humble avocations,

{ 122 }THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

whereas lower-caste Hindus may acquire great
wealth, and, under modern conditions, rise to
positions of considerable influence. But the
Brahman gua Brahman always remains entitled
to the reverence due to his caste from every
Hindu who clings to orthodox beliefs.

I will give you another instance from my own
experience. I was staying at Viceregal Lodge at
Delhi when a Hindu of a lower caste but high
up in the public service, Western educated and
wearing European dress, came to have an audience
with the viceroy, and as he passed up the steps,
I saw him stoop almost to the ground to do homage
and go through the form of kissing the naked feet of
the chuprassi, or doorkeeper, who wore the viceroy’s
scarlet and gold livery, but was a Brahman.

In these circumstances you can imagine the
immense and peculiar difficulties and pitfalls with
which Western education was and still is beset
among Hindus. The response which it met with
in the earliest days of its introduction was never-
theless marvelous, and not least among the higher
castes of whom some of the most gifted members
actually embraced Christianity. But the reaction
was bound to follow. Western education struck
at the roots of too many ancient customs and
beliefs, and at too many vested interests, and,

{ 123 JTHE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

not least, at those of the higher castes, es-
pecially those of the Brahmans, while the political
changes, which were steadily extending the area
of direct British administration in India and
sweeping away some of the worst survivals of
indigenous administration, where they proved
themselves utterly incorrigible, spread equal alarm
in other intensely conservative quarters.

Nor was it only with Hindu civilization that
Western education was in conflict. The vast
majority of the peoples of India were Hindus, but
there was also a large Mohammedan minority.
The fundamental monotheism of the Indian
Mohammedan drew him in some respects nearer
than the Hindu to his new British rulers, but there
was nevertheless the same deep-rooted antagonism
between the Mohammedan outlook on life and all
forms of Western progress in India as in other
parts of the Islamic world. The Indian Moham-
medans proved, in fact, for a long time more
refractory to Western education than the Hindus,
and though there was no love lost between
Mohammedans and the Hindus, those who stand
in the ancient ways, whether Mohammedans or
Hindus, were alike rebels at heart against the
Western civilization which British rule was import-
ing into India.

[| 124 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

That rebellion was at the bottom of the great
Mutiny of 1857. It was on the surface a military
revolt, but, if Mohammedans did most of the
fighting, Hindus supplied the brains and a great
deal of the driving power. It was a disastrous
episode, for, though it was a short one and con-
fined to a relatively small area of upper and cen-
tral India, the horrors which accompanied the rising
and the sternness of its repression gave a deplor-
able setback to the better influences on both sides
which before the mutiny had been steadily moving
toward mutual understanding and good will.

The East India Company, which had long
ceased to be a trading corporation but had
remained under Parliament the principal agency
of government and administration in India,
disappeared altogether after the mutiny, when the
crown assumed, as Clive himself had urged a
whole century earlier, direct and sole responsibility.
The central government was invested under the
control of the British Parliament with supreme
authority over the provincial governments and
with power to maintain the old treaty connections
with the autonomous native states and their
princes. The machinery remained practically
the same, except that the secretary of state for
India who was henceforth a member of the

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British cabinet superseded the Company’s Board
of Control in London, and the governor-general of
India came to be described as viceroy.

Queen Victoria’s proclamation conveyed to
her Indian peoples a generous assurance of her
undiminished confidence and affection. “In their
prosperity,” she said, “will be our strength, in
their contentment our security, and in their
gratitude our best reward.”

Then followed fifty years of internal peace and
great material progress, for though one is shy
to use the word “prosperity” in relation to a
country where the standard of living is still
incredibly low among the toiling masses, the
extraordinary growth of the population, which
rose within that half-century from two to three
hundred millions, affords ample evidence of
steadily improved conditions. In the towns and
especially among the Hindus, the demand for
Western education increased continuously. The
rising generation thronged to the high schools and
universities, of which the first was founded at
Calcutta just after the mutiny, on the model of
the then recent University of London, which,
unlike Oxford and Cambridge, has no residential
colleges but is mainly a teaching and examining
body. The Indians, as was their wont, looked of

{ 126 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

course to the government to provide them with
educational facilities, and the Education Depart-
ment became one of the most important of govern-
ment departments.

Looking back now, it is easy to see the weak
points of an educational system too closely and
mechanically modeled on our own for such a
widely different country as India. In the first
place, it was concentrated mainly upon higher
education, and began from the top, in the over-
sanguine belief that education would ultimately
filter down from the higher to the lower strata of
Indian society, with the result that it tended
to widen the gulf between the educated urban
classes and the great peasant masses forming
three-quarters of the whole population, who
remained as they had been, time immemorial,
absolutely illiterate and sunk in ancient depths
of ignorance. Instruction in the various courses,
mostly literary, which were held to constitute
higher education, was conveyed solely through
the medium of English, which in extremely few
cases was spoken or even understood in the homes
of the students, who were to great extent, as a
rule, largely estranged from their families.

As the government of India deemed itself
bound to maintain complete neutrality in all

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matters of religion, education was not only strictly
undenominational and absolutely divorced from
religious teaching, but also very largely from all
moral training and discipline. It was, in fact,
mainly confined to the training of the intellect,
and could do little for the vital side of education,
which consists of the forming of character.
Such criticisms apply only in part to the excellent
educational work of the missionaries—quite a
few of them Americans—which has in some parts
of India extended also to the masses. But they,
too, were bound to a system in which examinations
tended to become the one supreme test and the
results to be judged too often rather by quantity
than by quality.

But with all its shortcomings, the system did
ereat things. In a country where there are
twenty quite different languages, each spoken
by millions of people, besides an immense number
of minor dialects, the teaching of English as the
common tongue of all the Western-educated
classes created a bond of unity which the peoples of
India had never before possessed. The Western-
educated Indian began to fill all the subordinate
branches of the administration and all the liberal
professions, and to have a distinct mentality of
hisown. But he remained essentially a townsman,

{ 128 }THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

and his influence at first was slight outside the
great cities in which his own interests centered.
Another result followed which might have been
foreseen but was not. You could not make
textbooks out of the speeches of Burke and Fox
and out of Mill “On Liberty” and expound the
history of British political institutions “‘broad-
based on freedom” to a highly intelligent race
without inoculating it with the germs of political
liberty and even of nationhood. Western-educated
Indians not unnaturally began to demand a
larger participation in the control of the public
affairs of their own country, and a larger share
in the official bureaucracy. But the distrust
engendered by the mutiny had obscured the earlier
vision of men like Munro, who looked forward
to the time when England should have trained
Indians to govern and protect themselves. The
latter were no doubt still unfit, but Englishmen
were less willing than before the mutiny to believe
that they could ever be made fit. Racial feeling
had been revived and embittered, and on the
British side it showed itself, for instance, strong
enough to compel the viceroy, Lord Ripon, to
yield to the clamor of Englishmen in India,
official as well as unofficial, and water down the

famous Ilbert Bill of 1883, which, with the full
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approval of the Liberal British government at

-home, had been drafted for the redress of certain

racial inequalities in forms of judicial procedure.
That unfortunate episode led to a momentous
parting of the ways.

In the following year, a small group of progres-
sive Indians, though still thoroughly devoted to
the British connection, founded the Indian
National Congress as an informal parliament to
ventilate Indian grievances and to appeal to
British opinion at home in England, over the head
of the constituted government of India in whom
they had lost faith. Englishmen, official and
unofficial, instead of lending them a helping and
suiding hand, which might have kept the Congress
on permanently constitutional lines, viewed that
movement with suspicion and resentment, and
drove it almost inevitably into more and more
vehement opposition which has grown today into
open and bitter antagonism.

But there was this excuse for the British atti-
tude toward the Indian National Congress, that
it represented from the outset only that small
section of Indians who had been brought together
by common contact with the Occident and were
scarcely at all in touch with the great rural masses,
while the Mohammedans held for a long time

{ 130 ]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

entirely aloof from it. It served, however, as a
focus for every form of discontent and, before
the present century was many years old, British
rule had to reckon not only with the reactionary
forces banded together against all the liberal
tendencies of Western education, but with a
stream of revolutionary forces claiming to draw
their inspiration from the Occident, but un-
fortunately just from those parts of the Occident
where revolutionary methods were regarded as
alone capable of effecting political and social
progress. These revolutionary forces were recruited
mainly amongst immature youths who distorted
the meaning of their schoolroom lessons or were
embittered by failure in their examinations and
the consequent closing against them of the avenues
to lucrative employment and especially to official
employment by the state which they had been apt to
regard as the assured reward of Western education.

The same sort of intellectual proletariat grew
up in India that has provided the rank and file
of revolutionary movements in many European
countries. Young Indians, who borrowed the
doctrines and the bombs of Russian anarchism,
formed themselves into secret societies dedicated
to the goddess Kali, the dark and sanguinary
consort of Shiva, the god of destruction; and to

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all the increasing manifestations of Indian dis-
content on more constitutional lines was added
an epidemic of political assassinations of which the
victims were not only British officials but Indians
whose only crime was that they were loyal servants
of government.

The emergence of Japan and her resounding
victories in Manchuria against a great European
power helped at the same time to undermine the
Indian belief in the material invincibility of the
Occident. Western-educated public opinion in
India grew demonstratively impatient at the
tardiness and inadequacy of the concessions with
which the British government had hitherto met
the Indians’ demand for a larger share in the
administration and government of their country.
They were not satisfied with municipal institutions
kept in official leading strings or with the small
legislative councils which gave to Indian members
little more than a consultative voice in public
affairs, or with the admission of a mere sprinkling
of Indians in the higher branches of the public
services, though the lower branches were already
almost exclusively manned by Indians.

Public opinion in England was perplexed and
alarmed, but with the advent of a liberal govern-
ment in 1906 and John Morley’s appointment to

{ 132 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

the India office, a serious attempt was made to
meet Indian desires. The Indian Councils Act
of 1909 gave a large extension of powers both to
the central and provincial legislatures, and Indians
were for the first time appointed to the viceroy’s
Executive Council, hitherto the citadel of British
authority in India, and to the India Council in
London, also until then a stronghold of the
Anglo-Indian bureaucracy. These measures were
at first warmly welcomed in India, and when
King George and Queen Mary paid at the end
of 1911 their first visit to their Indian Empire as
reigning sovereigns, they were greeted with uni-
versal enthusiasm, carried in some places to the
embarrassing lengths of that semi-divine worship
which Hindu tradition accords to kingship.

But the great waves of emotion which sweep
over India often subside as rapidly, and the worst

revolutionary elements were shown to be still

in being when just a year afterward a bomb
was thrown with very nearly mortal effect at the
viceroy, Lord Hardinge, while he was making his
state entry into Delhi, which the king-emperor
had himself proclaimed to be the new capital of
his Indian Empire.

Political agitation was once more acute when
the Great War broke out. Then it was suddenly

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hushed and England herself was astonished at
the wonderful outburst of loyalty among the
princes and peoples of India. They were, above
all, proud to see the Indian Army sent to Europe
to fight shoulder to shoulder with the British
Army in France, and right gallantly did it help
to hold up the Germans during the very critical
winter of Ig14-15. Asquith, who was then prime
minister, gave genuine expression to England’s
gratitude when he declared that Indian questions
would henceforth have to be approached from
‘“‘a new angle of vision.” But in the protracted
stress of war, the fulfilment of that promise was
so long delayed that within the next two years
all the old discontents flamed up afresh in the
shape of another raging and tearing campaign,
this time for immediate Swaraj, an elastic term
which, though it may mean only local self-

government, was then clearly intended to mean

complete autonomy or even absolute independence.
British ministers were compelled by urgent appeals
from the government of India itself to lay their
war-maps aside for a moment and remember
Asquith’s pledge.

In August, 1917, Montagu, a radical statesman
who had lately gone to the India office, in Lloyd
George’s coalition government, made the most

1 134 |THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

momentous declaration which the British Parlia-
ment had ever listened to 1n connection with
India. The purpose of British policy in India

was to be henceforth, he stated,

not only the increasing association of Indians in every branch
of the administration, but also the greatest development of
self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive
realisation of responsible government in India as an integral

part of the British Empire.

He himself proceeded shortly afterward to India
and drew up, in consultation not only with the
viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, but with representative
Indians of all political complexions, an exhaustive
report which served as a basis for the great
Government of India Bill adopted by both
Houses of Parliament at the end of Ig1g.

That measure embodied profound constitu-
tional changes in the government and administra-
tion of India. It endowed India with representa-
tive institutions in the shape of an all-Indian
legislature as well as provincial bodies, in which the
Indians were assured of an elected majority.
The ultimate responsibility of the British govern-
ment was fully safeguarded, but in the Indian
provincial governments large fields of administra-
tion were transferred to Indian ministers respon-
sible to their provincial legislatures, and even the

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supreme executive government of India with
almost half of its members henceforth Indian had
henceforth to reckon, for the first time, with a
great Indian popular assembly. A great impetus
was given at the same time to the Indianization
of all the public services, which is now steadily
proceeding. The elections took place in the follow-
ing year, 1920, and the Duke of Connaught, sent
out to represent the king at the opening of the new
legislatures, delivered a royal message in which
King George did not hesitate himself to use the
word Swaraj that had come to be regarded by
British officialdom in India as an almost openly
seditious war-cry:

For years—it may be for generations—patriotic and
loyal Indians have dreamed of Swaraj for their motherland.
Today you have the beginnings of Swaraj within my Empire,

and the widest scope and ample opportunity for progress to
the liberty which my other Dominions enjoy.

This new constitutional charter represents
the boldest attempt that has ever yet been made
to graft political institutions of the democratic
Occident on an ancient and still vital form of
oriental civilization. A disastrous combination of
circumstances tended to jeopardize the success
of this great experiment at its very inception.
It was fiercely denounced by the extreme national-

{ 136 ]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

ists, for whom it did not go far enough to satisfy
their dream of complete Indian independence,
and by the old reactionaries, who resented any
endeavor to build up the framework of modern
European institutions on the ancient and sacred
soil of Hinduism, which was supposed to have
enjoyed a golden age—quite mythical—of wealth
and knowledge and freedom beyond all nations
of the earth before the Occident broke in upon it.

Out of these conflicting discontents there
suddenly emerged the magnetic personality of
Mahatma Gandhi, whose ascetic life and prophetic
eloquence invested a widespread movement of
revolt against the Occident with something of
a religious halo in a country where religion 1s still
a supremely vital force. A Hindu, but of the
somewhat lowly caste of Bunnias, or traders,
he had received a thorough Western education and
had been called to the bar in London. But he
had been embittered against the Occident first
by the hardships which he had seen inflicted on
his fellow-Indians in South Africa under the plea
of preserving the superiority of the white race,
and more recently by the harsh methods of re-
pression employed in the Punjab after the revolu-
tionary outbreak of April, 1919, and especially
by General Dyer’s ruthless action at Amritzar,

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of which it may be said, to borrow the Duke of
Connaught’s weighty language, “the shadow has
lengthened over the face of India.”

For Gandhi it was not merely British rule in
India but Western civilization itself that was
“Satanic.” Against every manifestation of that
civilization he exhorted his people to rebel and
as a first step to refuse any sort of co-operation
with government and to boycott the elections
for the new representative assemblies. He urged
them equally to shun modern schools and law
courts, and even hospitals, as “Satanic,” and he
would have them shun as equally “Satanic” all
the inventions and appliances of modern science,
and above all every form of modern industry.
What he would have India return to besides the
domestic spinning-wheel and homespun clothes
is hard to say. I had one long and interesting
talk with him but I vainly tried to obtain from
him some picture of what India would be like
under Swaraj, as he understood it. He spoke
vaguely of restoring the old Indian village com-_
munity, with its Panchayats, or Councils of
Elders, in which justice would be dispensed “in
accordance with the conscience of India,” and of
substituting for ponderous school and college
buildings “as stifling to the boy’s body as modern

{ 138 JTHE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

educational processes are to his soul,”’ simpler struc-
tures “open to God’s air and light” in which
“the learning of their forefathers would make
free men of them once more.” Then, quit of
railways and telegraphs and all other instruments
and symbols of Western economic bondage,
India, he assured me, would return to the pristine
felicity of prehistoric Vedic times. All this was
to be achieved by soul force, and he himself
constantly preached non-violence.

Yet this Hindu prophet and apostle of non-
violence was induced to throw his mantle over a
purely Mohammedan movement in support of
Turkey engineered by Indian Mohammedans,
who barely did lip-worship to his doctrine of
non-violence. The leaders of the Indian khalifate
movement belonged to the new school of Moham-
medans, who, turning their backs upon the old
traditions of their community, had joined hands
in the National Congress with the Hindu extremists
for the subversion of British rule. Some of them,
and notably the brothers, Mohamed and Shau-kat
Ali, had been in contact with the Young Turks
before the war, and as they refused to give any
assurances of loyalty when the war broke out,
they had been interned for its duration. Released
after the war, they had seen their opportunity

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in the difficulties which the resurgence of Turkey
created fortheAllies andespecially for Great Britain.

But they could not hope to carry the bulk of
their co-religionists with them unless they affixed
a religious label to their pro-Turkish campaign.
That label was the khalifate. The Occident,
they preached, was banded together under the
leadership of Britain to destroy Islam by robbing
the sultan of Turkey of the territorial and temporal
power essential to the discharge of his spiritual
duties as khalif. It was an adroit move and
singularly successful. A hundred years ago the
Indian Mohammedans knew little about Turkey.
It was indeed the British rulers of India who
themselves first magnified Turkey in the eyes of
the Indian Mohammedans when they courted their
support during the Crimean War, and again when
Lord Beaconsfield sent an Indian force to Malta
in 1878 in anticipation of another war against
Russia in defense of Turkey.

Abdul Hamid’s Pan-Islamic propaganda did
not make any very widespread impression in
India, though he had started it there as far back
as 1884, but it was not wholly ineffective, and
things happened before the Great War—more
especially the Italian invasion of Tripoli and the
Balkan wars—to fill the whole Mohammedan

[ 140 }THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

world with deep anxiety as to the future of all
Islamic states. All this was for a time almost
forgotten during the Great War, though the revolt
of the sherif of Mecca against Turkey shocked
many Indian Mohammedans as an act of treachery
to Islam. The khalifate propaganda in favor of
Turkey did not, at any rate, fall upon entirely
unreceptive ears. On the contrary, it very soon
assumed proportions which so seriously alarmed
both Delhi and London that the British Empire
had finally to join in the collective surrender
at Lausanne with which I have dealt in one of
my previous lectures.

Gandhi, without stopping to probe the merits
of the case, bestowed his blessing on the khalifate
movement as a great demonstration of religious
faith on the part of his Mohammedan fellow-
countrymen. He, of course, did not fail to preach
to them the duty of non-violence. But he had
reckoned without the militant spirit of Islam,
and the khalifate movement was responsible
for more outbreaks of violence than Gandhi's
own Hindu revivalist campaigns. The rising of
Mohammedan Moplahs on the Malabar coast,
in 1921, recalled the worst atrocities perpetrated
by the early Mohammedan conquerors of India
many centuries ago. It was nominally directed at

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first against British rule, but the Moplahs promptly
turned upon their Hindu neighbors whom they
either slaughtered and plundered ruthlessly or com-
pelled at the point of the sword to embrace Moham-
medanism, until British troops came to their rescue.

The lesson was not lost on the Hindus in other
parts of India, and many of them learned to
dread a return to the old days of Mohammedan
domination if ever India’s connection with Britain
were finally severed. One of the leading Hindu
extremists in Bengal has sought this year to devise
a pact which would secure continued co-operation
between Hindus and Mohammedans for the
attainment of Indian independence, but in spite
of his great personal influence its terms have been
indignantly rejected by a large proportion of
Hindus as far too favorable to the Mohammedans
whose prestige has suffered at the same time
grievously from the Turkish change of front and
the abolition of the khalifate at Angora. The
relations between the two communities are perhaps
more strained than ever at the present day, and
the British power alone prevents them from fly-
ing at each other’s throats.

An intolerable strain was put upon the forbear-
ance which the government of India had extended
to the non-co-operative movement when Gandhi

[ 142 ]THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

proclaimed the boycott of the Prince of Wales’s
visit to India eighteen months ago. Though some
violent rioting occurred as soon as he landed in
Bombay, the boycott was on the whole a failure.
But Gandhi himself admitted that the government
was acting entirely within its rights when it at
last had him arrested and placed on his trial as a
persistent disturber of the public peace. He was
condemned to two years’ imprisonment, but he
was released this winter before the end of his term
on grounds of ill-health, and having recovered
from his illness, he has now promptly revived his
original program, including passive resistance and
at some future date a general refusal to pay taxes.
But during his imprisonment other and _ less
unworldly spirits had been fighting to get control
of the movement which he had started.

Three years ago Gandhi had banned all
participation in the elections to the new repre-
sentative assemblies, but he failed, and the new
assemblies showed, on the whole, a great deal of
capacity and discretion. At the second general
election held at the end of 1923 many of his
former followers, disregarding his injunctions,
stood for election and were returned, largely at
the expense of the more moderate Indians who
had accepted the reforms as at least a first and

{ 143 ]

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material step toward dominion self-government
in India. The avowed purpose of this change of
front on the part of the Extremists is to wreck
from inside the assemblies the constitutional
scheme of reforms which Gandhi had failed to
wreck from outside. But he is not to be moved
from his old position, and the breach between
him and the new school has been widened by a
sensational demonstration which more directly
than anything that has yet happened challenges
his doctrine of non-violence. A few months ago
a young Bengali student murdered an inoffensive
English merchant in Calcutta whom he admitted
to have mistaken for a British official. It was a
dastardly crime, but the provincial branch of
the Indian National Congress actually passed a
resolution commending the murderer for his pa-
triotic devotion, and passed it with the support of
the new Swarajist leader, Das, who seems to have
now set himself up almost openly against Gandhi.

It is not by such methods, though they may
produce in some a feeling akin to despair or provoke
others to advocate hasty and unworthy reprisals,
that Englishmen’s patient faith in their capacity
to train Indians to govern and protect themselves
will be seriously shaken. Have they not, after
all, succeeded already in training them to play

[144 }THE BRITISH EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

a great part today in every field of the new
India’s life? Indians today are members of the
executive government at Delhi and in the prov-
inces. They are judges of the high courts, and
one of them even sits on the judicial committee
of the Privy Council at home. There is an
Indian high commissioner in London, and Indians
sit on the Council of the secretary of state for
India, in Whitehall. There is no position in the
great public services to which Indians cannot
aspire on terms of equality with Englishmen.
There are among them men of letters and of science
whose names are honorably known throughout the
Occident. They are rapidly becoming the captains
of industry andcommerce. All these we can claim
as the intellectual offspring of Western education
which the British rule brought withit. We clearly
have to do our duty by them.

But we have also a duty toward the scores of
millions of inarticulate Indians, who if they know
nothing else of the Occident, have learned to put
their trust in British rule as that which divides
them least and is best able to hold the balance
between all their conflicting creeds, castes, and
races. There are only 120,000 Englishmen in
India, including the British garrisons—the merest
handful among a population of 320,000,000—and

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it is certainly not by the sword alone that they
can hold the fort for Western civilization, not in
India alone but throughout the Orient. For it is
not in India alone but all over the Orient that the
prestige of the Occident has suffered grievously
from the spectacle which it presents today of a
battered and bleeding Europe.

The critical period of transition in India,
which was precipitated by the Great War, may
prove longer and more difficult than was antici-
pated when India received five years ago her great
constitutional charter, and the relatively small
but undeniably influential class of Indians upon
whom it conferred unprecedented constitutional
powers have been slower to learn how to exercise
them constitutionally. But it is all part of the
great experiment upon which Britain entered a
hundred years ago when she gave Western educa-
tion to India, and she owes it not only to herself
but to the Indians, and even to those who now
revile her, to go through with it. For upon the
success or failure of an experiment conducted
on so vast a scale, involving the future of a great
subcontinent, inhabited by nearly a fifth of the
human race, depends more than upon anything
else in the Orient the peaceful readjustment of its
relations with the Occident.

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The proclamation of a British protectorate
in Egypt took place under such exceptional war
conditions that it cannot be regarded as typical
of the systems of European protectorates over
oriental states which grew up in the latter part
of the nineteenth century as an alternative
to annexation pure and simple. The germs may
be found in the treaties of subordinate alliance
concluded much earlier in that century between
many of the Indian native states and the British
government of India, which secure to the latter
absolute control over foreign relations and to the
Indian princes the maintenance of their hereditary
rights of rulership and a large measure of autonomy
in regard to internal administration so long as
they conform to minimum standards of decent
and humane government.

It is the French who in recent times have
applied that system with perhaps the greatest
success. Whereas when they occupied Algiers
in 1830 they ended by annexing Algeria and

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assimilating its administration largely to that of
continental France, they were content in 1881 to
establish a protectorate over the adjoining territory
of Tunis, taking over control of its foreign relations
and to a lesser extent of its internal administration,
but maintaining the hereditary rights and formal
authority of its ruler under French overlordship.
Protectorates have been established on similar
lines by the British over Zanzibar and other parts
of tropical Africa, which do not come within my
purview. The most useful illustration I can take
is, I think, the French protectorate established
in IgI2 over the greater part of Morocco; for
Morocco has had altogether a peculiarly interesting
history.

Unlike Egypt and indeed unlike all the rest
of the Arab world which had shared in the brilliant
Mohammedan civilization of the early Middle
Ages, Morocco escaped Turkish domination,
though the Ottoman Empire once stretched
along the southern shores of the Mediterranean
almost to her doors. Thus when the Moors were
finally driven out of Spain and retired to their own
country in a sheltered corner of northwest Africa
they were left in possession of their national
independence and of the memories at least of
the glorious age in which their forebears had

[ 150 ]PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

ruled in Spain. The people of Morocco converted
to Islam when the Arab followers of Mohammed
swept them along with them to the conquest of
Spain never had and have not today much Arab
blood in them; for the majority of them, especially
on and beyond the great Atlas range, are Berbers
of north African stock, speaking their own north
African tongue, and while professing Moham-
medanism, still in a very primitive stage of tribal
evolution, in which ancient tribal custom refuses
as yet to yield even to Mohammedan canon law.
But Arabic is still the polite language of Morocco,
and whatever of civilization endures in Morocco
derives from the Arab civilization of Spain and is
indeed still commonly called Andalusian.

The noblest surviving monument of its ancient
glory, the Kutubia at Marrakesh, was built by
the same Arab architect who reared the Giralda
at Seville. The beautiful Medersas of Fez belong
to the same order, and all that is best in the arts
and crafts of Morocco is still rightly termed
Andalusian. Some of the great Moorish families
are reputed to have still in their possession the
keys of the houses in which their ancestors lived
in Seville or Granada. Others pride themselves
on a common ancestry with distinguished families
of Arab descent still living in France and Spain.

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When I was in Morocco last winter I paid my
respects to the governor of Rabat, Mohamed
Burgash, a dignified old gentleman of ancient
Arab lineage, who told me that two branches of
his family were still extant in Southern Europe,
both now of course Christian, the one Spanish,
the other French.

The Moors are a proud race, and they have
not forgotten the bitter story of their expulsion
from Spain. The University of Fez, founded a
thousand years ago, is today still a stronghold
of Mohammedan orthodoxy, and in Fez, which 1s
the northern capital, there lingers perhaps more
than in any other Moorish city a subtle atmosphere
of inherited anti-Christian and anti-European hos-
tility.

They never owed allegiance either temporal
or spiritual to the Turkish sultans, and though
they have passed through stormy periods of
internal strife, they have always had their own
independent sultans who have been also their
khalifs in complete disregard of all the Turkish
sultans’ claims to the khalifate. They set their
face equally against the Occident, and if occidental
nations like the Spaniards and the Portuguese
sometimes got a foothold on their coast—England
held Tangier for twenty inglorious years as part

[ 152}PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

of the dowry which Catherine of Braganza brought
to King Charles II—the Barbary pirates from the
Atlantic ports of Morocco boldly raided across
the ocean and often on to the very coasts of
England all through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Tens of thousands of Europeans were
carried away as captives to Morocco and sold
into slavery. Some of them, having embraced
their new masters’ faith, rose to high positions
' 1n which their Western knowledge was frequently
put to use. Foreign trade, too, was somehow
maintained in the coast towns even in the worst
days of piracy, and foreign merchants were allowed
to reside there, some of them with consular
privileges.

But the sultans of Morocco rarely demeaned
themselves to hold diplomatic intercourse with
the infidels, and when representatives of the
foreign powers came to reside at Tangier, they
were held there at arms’ length, and, even when
they occasionally braved the difficulties of a long
journey through a roadless country to the Moorish
court at Fez or Marrakesh, in order to present
their credentials or to settle outstanding questions,
they had, until quite the end of the last century,
to stand bareheaded and on foot in the presence
of the sultan when he gave them their first public

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THE OC CIDENT ANDTHE ORTENG

reception in his camp, while he himself sat on his
horse under his great umbrella of state.

Even when a hundred years ago the conquest
of Algeria first gave Morocco a European neighbor,
her aloofness from the West was only temporarily
disturbed, and she continued to stagnate in her
own medieval backwater until 1t was stirred by
the uninvited intrusion of European powers in
quest originally of new markets for their increasing
industrial output. The rivalry between France
and Britain, who were with Spain the first to
appear.on the scene, soon, however, ceased to be
purely economic, as besides her commercial interests
Britain as a naval power could not remain indiffer-
ent to the fate of Morocco who held one side of the
Straits of Gibraltar and had a long and strategically
important seaboard on the western Atlantic.

France, on the other hand, with her great
possessions reaching to the borders of Morocco
on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and
stretching across the Sahara toward her growing
West African colonies on the Atlantic, held that
she had equal if not superior claims to political
ascendancy in the northwest corner of Africa
which she had already almost enveloped. Spain
also had ambitions in Morocco, but she was
relatively a negligible quantity, and France and

1 154]PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

Britain wisely settled their differences when the
German emperor suddenly entered the lists and
threatened to cast his sword into the scales. In
the Anglo-French Convention of 1904, which
covered the whole field of Anglo-French overseas
rivalry, France undertook to leave Britain a free
hand in Egypt in exchange for the British recog-
nition of superior French interests in Morocco.
Germany had until then hardly ever concerned
herself with Morocco, where even her commercial
interests were insignificant. For a whole year she
nursed in silence her resentment of the Anglo-
French agreement. Then in 1905 William II’s
demonstrative visit to Tangier was the crowning
incident in a systematic campaign of intimidation
against France in which Germany put the question
of Morocco in the foreground—almost to the point
of war—as the acid test of Franco-British friend-
ship in the hope of driving in a wedge between
France and Britain before their renewed intimacy
had had time to consolidate. This hope was
doomed to speedy disappointment, for, though
France yielded so far as to agree to the Moroccan
question’s being referred to an international con-
ference at Algeciras, France and England made
common cause there, and Germany was fain to
accept the compromise offered to her in the shape

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

of an understanding for joint co-operation in the
development of Morocco’s economic resources.

The political independence of Morocco was,
however, still nominally intact, and she might
have saved herself had she taken time by the
forelock and put her house in order. But of
this she was incapable. Only the religious fanati-
cism of her people reacted against the interference
of infidel powers, and early in 1911 a general rising
of the tribes against the sultan, Mulai Hafid,
assumed such proportions that at his instance
the French sent an expedition from Algeria to
relieve the beleaguered city of Fez. Then followed
another acute crisis, which again brought Europe
to the verge of war when Germany challenged
the action of France by sending the German
cruiser “Panther” to the faraway port of Agadir
in which German interests were nil. This was
a more threatening demonstration than even
the emperor’s visit to Tangier six years before and
was equally intended to test Anglo-French rela-
tions. It failed again, and once more Germany
was fain to accept a compromise by which in
return for a transfer of territory in the French
Congo to Germany the latter recognized a French
political protectorate over Morocco, economic
equality alone being reaffirmed.

156 }PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

In 1912 the sultan, Mulai Hafid, signed the
treaty by which he formally accepted the French
protectorate, but only after a fresh period of
serious disturbance and risings, directed as much
against an unpopular and worthless ruler as against
the French infidels, did the Moorish people as a
whole resign themselves to the protectorate.
Even to the present day the Berber tribesmen of
the Atlas Mountains maintain a desultory struggle
against it in the same spirit in which they have
fought from time immemorial against every at-
tempt on the part of their own sultans to enforce
any settled form of government upon them.

Tangier, which almost faces Gibraltar on the
Straits, has been recently placed under a separate
international administration, and south of it
there is a narrow Spanish zone extending from
the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in which the
Spaniards are still engaged in fighting down,
sometimes with disastrous results to themselves,
the stubborn resistance of the Riff tribesmen in
their almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses.
The French protectorate extends over the rest,
i.e., nine-tenths of Morocco, or roughly the same
area as that of continental France.

The success of a protectorate depends very
much upon the spirit in which it is administered.

{ 157]

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The French have been fortunate enough to find
in Marshal Lyautey an agent who laid himself out
from the very first to make their protectorate
acceptable to the Moorish people. Though essen-
tially a soldier, Lyautey combines the gift of
broad and far-sighted statesmanship with a rare
combination of energy and patience and an
abundance of human sympathy. For him the
protectorate has been no mere diplomatic figment
invented to disguise an alien domination imposed
by force. Soon after he had been appointed
resident general he formulated his conception
of a protectorate as

a system under which the country preserves its own institu-
tions and governs and administers itself through its own
organs under the mere general control of a power, who,
having taken charge of its foreign relations, assumes the
general direction of its military forces and finances and
economic development. The dominant characteristic of a
protectorate is control as opposed to direct administration.

In Mulai Hafid’s successor, Mulai Yusef, the
present sultan, Marshal Lyautey has found a
ruler who has loyally accepted that interpretation
of a protectorate.

Marshal Lyautey seeks and generally follows
the sultan’s advice in matters not only affecting
the internal administration of the country which

1 158 JPROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

is left very largely in the hands of the sultan’s
officials, but also in those which he might well
regard as reserved to the discretion of the protect-
ing power. It has, in fact, been the marshal’s
policy to maintain and even to enhance the sultan’s
position as both a temporal and spiritual ruler.
The restoration of law and order to an extent
which no ruler had ever achieved in former times
has: already been carried so far that the sultan
can now make a peaceful progress through many
parts of his dominions into which he would never
have ventured before, except at the head of a
large army recruited mainly by the promise of
plunder. :

It must inevitably be a strain upon the con-
science of orthodox Mohammedans to see their
khalif acquiesce in the protectorate of an infidel
power, but the strain has been relieved in Morocco
not only by the misfortunes which have overtaken
a rival khalif in Turkey, but still more by the
scrupulous regard which the French, and the
marshal first and foremost, have always shown for
their religious and social customs. Just as before
the occupation, no non-Mohammedan is allowed
to enter their mosques; the seclusion in which
they keep their women is respected; their own
law courts sit as of old for the administration of

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

justice in accordance with Mohammedan Sacred
Law. Ordinary relations between Frenchmen
and Moors are as a rule friendly and often cordial,
and in this respect Frenchmen doubtless have an
advantage over Englishmen as they seem to be
almost entirely free from the color prejudice
which has grown upon us nowadays considerably.
They have even sought to bring their new public
buildings into harmony with Moorish architecture,
while they have established a strong claim on the
gratitude of the Moors by taking in hand and
carrying out most admirably under the expert
direction of their deaux arts the restoration of the
ancient monuments which the Moors themselves
with all their piety were allowing to fall into decay.

The French no doubt keep a firm hold upon
the country, but with singularly little display of
military force. There have been no regular
French troops in Morocco since the early part of
the Great War when Lyautey took the risk of
releasing them for the Western front. Since
then he has relied entirely on African troops,
some of them raised in Morocco, but mostly
Tunisian, Algerian, and Senegalese, and their
only European stiffening is provided by the Foreign
Legion, a peculiar force recruited entirely from
volunteers of all nationalities of whom, strangely

{ 160 }}PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

enough, 65 per cent are today Germans. During
the war practically all who were not Germans
were sent over to fight in France, and Lyautey
likes to boast, laughingly, that throughout the
war he held Morocco for France with his Africans
and his own Germans.

To those who do not understand the German
mentality, it must seem almost incredible that
since the war Germans have been tumbling over
one another to be accepted for service in the French
Foreign Legion. Their French officers admit that
they make excellent soldiers, and only a few months
ago Marshal Lyautey recognized the gallantry
displayed by one of them in the fighting last
summer in the Atlas Mountains by bestowing
on him the French Military Medal which he,
a former officer in the German Army (I believe
in the Prussian Guards), now wears as well as
the German Iron Cross for the Great War.

I have not time to dwell on what the French
have done within the short span of twelve years
since the establishment of the French protectorate
for the material development of the country.
Splendid roads for motor traffic now connect all
the chief cities; the railways which were originally
built for military purposes are being transformed
and extended for general purposes; they have

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made new ports and harbors, and laid out new
towns, generally quite outside the Moorish walled
cities so as to diminish the chance of friction be-
tween the newcomers and the Moorish population;
they have created schools and hospitals, of which
the Moors are beginning to appreciate the value.

Everything, however, bears the impress of one
great personality, and when Marshal Lyautey re-
tires—an event which cannot be far off in view of
his advancing years and frequent ill-health—one
wonders whether the French will find for him a
successor capable of carrying on his work on the
same lines. Perhaps the greatest tribute to
him is the anxiety which prevails on this subject
among the Moors themselves. He has had one
singular advantage in carrying out his great
experiment. All he has had to contend with,
besides the impatience sometimes of his own people
who would prefer the more drastic methods
that obtain in other French dependencies, is the
innate conservatism of a Mohammedan country
to whose religious and social customs our Western
civilization is necessarily repugnant. He has not
had to reckon with the cross-currents which a
growing familiarity with the history and traditions
and political conceptions of the Occident tends to
create in many other oriental countries.

{ 162 ]PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

The French are now importing Western
education into Morocco where hitherto it was
almost unknown, but they are doing so slowly
and very cautiously in order to avoid the pitfalls
which have beset it elsewhere in the Orient.
Lyautey wants to carry Mohammedan opinion
with him, and he can claim to have achieved a
remarkable success in securing the consent and
even to some extent the good will of the ancient
University of Fez for a new Mohammedan college
under French direction with a broad modern
curriculum. But, dreading to create a half
educated semi-Europeanized intellectual prole-
tariat, he is anxious that Western education,
primary as well as secondary, should not outrun
the capacity of the country to absorb its products
and provide sufficient openings for their useful
employment.

For the present, however, Morocco knows
nothing of the ferment of Western education
which has been already long at work upon many
other oriental peoples, and has engendered among
them political aspirations and discontents directly
derived from the Occident. Hardly the remotest
breath of the Occident had passed over Morocco
until the French went in and built up an occidental
framework around the weather-beaten structure

{ 163 ]

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THE, OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

of an ancient oriental civilization which they have
hitherto been at great pains not to disturb.

In Morocco the protectorate system is seen
at its best as a milder substitute for the older and
more forceful methods of annexation. But even
there it stands for the definite subordination of an
oriental country to the paramount authority of a
single European power. Since the Great War,
on the other hand, a distinctly progressive step
has been taken in other parts of the Orient for
the readjustment of the relations between the
Occident and the Orient by the creation of the
mandatory system and its application, imperfect
as it still is, to the Arab provinces detached from
the Ottoman Empire.

When the Allied and Associated Powers met
together at the Paris Peace Conference, one of the
most important questions with which they were
faced was the disposal of the territories outside
Europe of which the enemy states were to be
permanently dispossessed. It was, I think quite
wisely, recognized that those territories could not
properly be handed over to any one of the victori-
ous powers, and when the League of Nations took
shape, on President Wilson’s initiative, it opened
up a new solution of the problem. Article 22 of
the Covenant declared that in such territories

[ 164 |PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

as were inhabited by peoples not yet able to
stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions
of the modern world, their well-being and develop-
ment should form a sacred trust of civilization,
and that the best method of giving practical
effect to that principle was to intrust the tutelage
of such peoples to advanced nations who by
reason of their resources, their experience, or their
geographical position could best undertake that
responsibility and were willing to exercise it as
mandatories on behalf of the League.

As J am concerned here merely with the
provinces detached from the Ottoman Empire,
I need only quote the paragraph that deals
specifically with them. It runs:

They have reached a stage of development where their
existence as independent nations can be provisionally rec-
ognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice
and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are
able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must
be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

Not only was the mandatory system largely
due to President Wilson’s inspiration, but the
word ‘‘mandate”’ was, in fact, used for the first
time in this connection by an American writer,
George Louis Beer, in an essay written before
the war was over with special reference to the

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future of Mesopotamia, and it is in Mesopotamia,
now called Iraq, that the system has had its
fairest trial.

It was the British armies that drove the Turks
out of Mesopotamia, and they remained in
occupation. The rough and ready system of
administration, not always very wise, which the
military authorities extemporized on the spot,
created all the more disappointment in that the
Arabs of Iraq had, as elsewhere, been led by the
declarations of British statesmen to believe that
they would not only be liberated from the Turkish
yoke, but allowed to join with the rest of Arabia
in the creation of a great Arab state under the
leadership of the ruler of the Hejaz at Mecca, who
had actually joined the Allies during the Great
War in open revolt against Turkey, and had
been recognized accordingly as king of the Hejaz
with full rights of sovereignty.

I shall not attempt to plead that these expecta-
tions were not in a large measure justified, or
that France and England, the two powers chiefly
concerned, can be absolved from blame for having
in the first place rashly raised them and then for
refusing to fulfil them, or at least postponing their
fulfilment more or less indefinitely. The always
dormant fanaticism of a Mohammedan population

{ 166PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

combined with the newly awakened sense of
nationhood to produce in Igig a serious rising
in Iraq which required a considerable military
effort for its repression. The mandate for Iraq
was not formally conferred upon Great Britain
till 1922, but from 1920 onward, when military
administration was superseded by civil, British
policy was framed in anticipation of the respon-
sibilities to be ultimately assumed under the
mandate. The British government set steadily
before itself the task of facilitating the evolution
of Iraq toward self-government and even inde-
pendence. Under an Arab king, Feisal, son of
the king of Hejaz, Iraq already possesses its
own national government, responsible to an
Arab Assembly under a constitution of its own
making.

The ultimate recognition of Iraq’s complete
independence was embodied together with the
necessary safeguards for special British interests
and general foreign interests, in a bilateral treaty
of alliance drafted in the same spirit as that in
which Lord Milner had in 1920 recommended the
negotiation of a bilateral treaty between Great
Britain and Egypt. That treaty under which
Britain undertakes to support an application from
the Iraq government to be admitted to the League

{ 167 ]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

of Nations has been adopted but only after much
hesitation by the newly elected assembly at
Baghdad. There was a very stubborn minority
composed of extreme Nationalists and of a
fanatical section of Mohammedans of the Shiah
persuasion determined to reject any agreed
settlement. But the majority finally realized
that but for British support the independence of
Iraq might be very short-lived, for the Turks will
in any case be unpleasant neighbors on the north-
ern frontiers of Iraq, and that frontier is not yet
finally drawn.

At Lausanne, Turkey claimed the whole
province of Mosul though the vast majority of
the population is Arab and not Turkish, and it
has always looked down stream, economically
and politically, toward Baghdad, whereas the
natural boundary lies well to the north in the
mountains of Kurdistan. The question of oil,
of which the district of Mosul is reputed to
contain large undeveloped supplies, has added a
new economic factor to the issue, though I believe
it has never played the decisive part which some
publicists, more especially on this side of the
Atlantic, are apt to ascribe to it.

Agreement having proved impossible at
Lausanne, the question was reserved for further

{ 168 |PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

and separate negotiations between Great Britain
and Turkey, and should they fail, for a final
reference to the League of Nations. So far
Turkey has not abated her extravagant demands,
and England may have to appeal to the League
of Nations, and put the good faith of the new
Turkish state to a public test.

Iraq, moreover, still lacks many of the elements
of stable government, and has not a tithe of the
leaven of Western knowledge and experience which
Egypt, for instance, possesses. The population
is largely nomadic, and even the townspeople
were never brought into contact under Turkish
rule with the better Western influences which had
long been at work in Egypt, and scarcely at all
with Western education. The British government
has declared that within four years from the
ratification of the treaty by the Iraq Assembly,
or at an earlier date, should Iraq become a mem-
ber of the League of Nations, it will withdraw
the last of the British forces, already very con-
siderably reduced, and, if so desired, all the
administrative agencies of British guidance and
assistance which the Iraq ministers have them-
selves expressed the desire to retain for the
present. There are good men in Iraq who have
shown themselves quick to learn, but they will

{ 169 ]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

have to carry the bulk of their fellow-countrymen
with them during the next four years if Iraq is
then to stand on her own legs. But if Britain can
secure a satisfactory settlement of the Mosul
question with Turkey, she will be in a position
to'claim that in Iraq at least she has done her
best to discharge her responsibilities as a manda-
tory power in accordance with the spirit of the
League of Nations Covenant.

In Syria and Palestine, which was formerly
regarded as one with Syria, the Arabs had been
led to conceive during the war even higher expecta-
tions of the future than in Iraq. For if a great
Arab state was to be formed out of the provinces
released from the Turkish yoke, the Syrian Arabs
were entitled to hope that they would play a
leading part init. They were in every way more
advanced than the Arabs of the Hejaz, of which
the Allies had already recognized the inde-
pendence. Many of them had received good
Western education, especially in two great institu-
tions at Beirut—the one a large Jesuit university
which enjoyed the whole-hearted support of
France, and the other an admirable American
university conducted, like Robert College at Con-
stantinople, also American, on the best modern
lines.

{ 170 JPROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

They possessed commercial and financial enter-
prise which had been developed in increasing
intercourse with the West, and a large number of
Syrians who found employment in Egypt during
the long period of British control had brought
home to their people the contrast between
occidental and Turkish methods of government.
From all these elements there had grown up a
vigorous national movement which had been
sealed with the blood of martyrs in the days of
the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress
and still more when Enver and Talaat ruled at
Constantinople during the Great War.

These hopes were raised to a high pitch when
the Turkish armies were driven headlong out of
Syria, and General Allenby, who commanded
the British ‘forces, allowed the Arab flag to be
hoisted at Damascus. But they faded away,
or were at least relegated to a very distant future,
at the Paris Peace Conference, when the Allied
and Associated Powers agreed that, until such
time as it would be practicable to create a great
independent Arab state, Syria should come, like
Iraq, under the mandatory system. An American
Commission sent out by President Wilson re-
ported a very widespread desire for an American
mandate, but no effect could be given to it when

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

the United States rejected the Versailles Treaty
and the Covenant of the League of Nations.
The door was at once reopened to Anglo-French
jealousies reaching far back into history, which
were only composed by the attribution to Britain
and France of two separate mandates for Palestine
and Syria, respectively.

Again, I do not propose to plead that the
attribution of those mandates by the League of
Nations is above criticism. The Covenant of the
League provides that the wishes of the populations
concerned should be a principal consideration.
There is abundant evidence to show that the ma-
jority of the Syrian population strongly objected
to a French mandate, and that the majority of the
Palestinian population did not desire a British
mandate if the latter was to be used as an im-
plement of the Zionist policy to which the British
cabinet had committed itself during the war by the
Balfour Declaration. That Declaration, I need
hardly remind you, contained the promise of a
national homeland for the Jewish people in
Palestine, and though it was specifically added
that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of existing non-
Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and
political status enjoyed by Jews in another

{ 172 |PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

country,’ it involved an experiment which imported
into the relations between the Occident and the
Orient an entirely new element of racial and re-
ligious discord. For if the Jews are an oriental
race and their religion has remained an essentially
oriental religion, those who were most intimately
associated with the Zionist movement were just
those who drew their inspiration from the most
advanced schools of occidental political thought,
or were ready to flood Palestine with the most
undesirable class of Jewish immigrants from the
ghettos of Russian and Polish cities.

Wealthy Jewish philanthropists have for the
last thirty or forty years founded and supported
a certain number of Jewish settlements in which
Jews rescued from the degradation of those
surroundings have unexpectedly shown that they
can be converted into good husbandmen and fruit
growers. The annual stream of Jewish pilgrims
who have always poured in from abroad to worship
at Jerusalem has also its economic value. But the
prospect of a large Jewish immigration of the type
contemplated by the leading Zionists was quite
another thing. The natural resources of the
country may be greatly expanded in time, but
at present it cannot support any large addition
to the population, nor is there room for such an

{ 173 |a

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

addition unless there are large transfers of land
from its present possessors to the newcomers.

The feeling of alarm among the majority of the
inhabitants of Palestine, both Mohammedan and
Christian, was all the greater as the most rabid
Zionists made no secret of their intention to
construe the Balfour Declaration as entitling
Jews to a predominant share in the government
and administration of the country. The British
high commissioner was himself a Jew, Sir Herbert
Samuel, but fortunately a man of high character
as well as ability, who just because he was a Jew
was perhaps more successful than any Christian
might have been in keeping the more ardent
Zionists within bounds. But the task assigned
to him seems to be as difficult as the squaring
of the circle, for to reconcile the second clause of
the Balfour Declaration with the first seems to
me almost to defy the wit of man. At any rate,
the Mohammedans, who form over three-quarters
of the population, have for the time being com-
posed their ancient differences with the tithe of
the population that is Christian in order to show
a solid front to the other tithe who are Jews.
Occasional affrays bear witness to the bitterness
of anti-Jewish feeling, although the small British
force maintained in the country has usually proved

1 174 ]PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

ample to maintain law and order, and Moham-
medans and Christians have so far persisted in
refusing to have lot or part in the proposed
Legislative Council on which they were offered
what they regarded as insufficient representation.
The Jewish population have alone so far perfected
their internal organization.

But Zionism has still to show whether it has
sufficient vitality to make good. Many of the
Jewish immigrants have already lost heart, and
the number of those who were brought in during
the last year is barely superior to that of those
who left the country in disgust. Among the
leading Jews in Europe and especially in England
there are many who have refused from the begin-
ning to have any faith in Zionism, and even in
America, where it has found its warmest supporters,
the stream of financial assistance upon which the
Jewish immigrants must for a great many years
be largely dependent, is reported to have percepti-
bly slackened. Meanwhile, Palestine can hardly
be said to have offered a happy field for the
mandatory system.

Nor can Syria. Only the Maronites, an old
Christian community in the Lebanon, who had
always been special protégés of France, were
prepared to welcome a French mandate, and the

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Mohammedans were distinctly hostile to it. A
congress of Syrian notables tried to force a con-
clusion on March 10, 1920, by offering the crown
of Syria, including Palestine, to Emir Feisal, son
of the king of the Hejaz, who accepted it with
the title of “king.”’ France regarded him as too
closely identified with British interests, and
Britain, besides having no wish to quarrel with
France over Syria, considered herself bound to
see that Palestine was set apart for the Zionist
experiment. Feisal was therefore summoned to
attend the San Remo Conference, and, when
he failed to attend, it was decided to assign
mandates for Palestine as well as Iraq to Great
Britain, and for Syria (without Palestine) to
France.

A French army, taking the place of the British
forces withdrawn after the war, was already in
occupation of Syria, and after overcoming some
resistance from Feisal’s troops, entered Damascus
and deposed the Emir and ordered him to leave
the country. As we have seen, he shortly found
another crown in Iraq, and the French began to
rule Syria as a mandated territory, but with a
heavier hand than was ever contemplated by the
authors of the Covenant, even before the attribu-
tion of the mandates for the provinces detached

{ 176 }PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

from the former Ottoman Empire was formally
approved by the Council of the League of Nations.
Since then things have somewhat improved.
The Christian Lebanon and the Druse country
of the Hauran have been granted their own
autonomy, and the three other provinces of Syria
have been federated. But beneath the surface
there is still much popular discontent.

It cannot, therefore, be contended that the
mandatory system in Syria or in Palestine has
fulfilled all the expectations raised in the Covenant
of the League of Nations, or even wholly conformed
to its provisions. The Arab dream of a great
and independent Arab state is still far from fulfil-
ment. In theory the independence of each of the
mandated states has been recognized, but only in
Iraq does it depend upon the people themselves
whether or not it shall become a reality in the
near future. The Hejaz, under King Hussein, 1s
indeed already an independent Arab kingdom, as
that was part of the bargain definitely struck with
Great Britain when he decided to throw in his
lot with the Allies in 1916. But his methods of
government and administration have not proved
such as to encourage confidence in the fitness of
the Arab tribesmen of the desert to govern
themselves on modern lines.

{177 ]

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The fact is that the end of the war left the
Allies face to face all over the Arab provinces
with a number of conflicting commitments into
which they had from time to time entered rather
recklessly in order to meet the exigencies of a
dificult and fluctuating war situation. Had
America been willing to burden herself with a
mandate for the whole or part of the Arab
countries, the problem would have been simplified,
for the United States had never been mixed up
in the political rivalries which complicated the
settlement, and the Arab peoples might have
been more easily induced to rely upon her impar-
tiality and good faith. But that was not to be,
and the mandatory system, however imperfectly
it has operated, is probably the only one by which
international conflicts could be avoided while
reserving for the Arabs the possibility at least of
working out their own salvation in a more or
less remote future.

The principle underlying the mandatory system
undoubtedly represents a progressive stage in
the evolution of the law of nations. For the first
time at the end of a great war in which enemy
territories had been conquered, the conquerors
agreed not only to forego the right of sovereignty
which they would formerly have claimed over

{ 178 }PROTECTORATES AND MANDATES

them almost as a matter of course, but to assume
for them the responsibilities of trusteeship under
the supervision of an independent authority.
They have to discharge those responsibilities at
their own cost and without any definite benefit
for themselves. Under the Covenant there seems
even to be no provision enabling them to lay
down a mandate if they find the burden imposed
upon them excessive. They have to send in an
annual report as trustees to the League of Nations,
which is the final authority to pass judgment on
the discharge of their trusteeship. How far in
the case of the mandated Arab territories the
mandatory system will supply a workable nexus
between the Occident and the Orient it is yet
too early to say, but as laid down in the Covenant
of the League it certainly constitutes a praise-
worthy attempt to readjust them in a new and
not ungenerous spirit.

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THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM AND
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Before placing a few general conclusions before
you I must invite your attention to the new and
demoralizing factor which bolshevism has intro-
duced into the relations between the Occident
and the Orient. Bolshevism itself is neither of
the Occident nor of the Orient, for while it seeks
to undermine the foundations of our Western
civilization, it has no affinity with any of those
types of oriental civilization upon whose antago-
nism to the West I have dwelt in some of my
preceding lectures. It has so far merely been a
destructive force, and in Europe it has triumphed
only in Russia. But Russia herself may be said
to have always stood psychologically and geo-
graphically midway between the Occident and the
Orient and to have been, beneath her thinly cul-
tured surface, quite as much Asian as European,
and as until the overthrow of the old autocracy
she ruled over a large part of the Asiatic continent,
she has become as formidable a base for bolshevist

{ 183 |

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propaganda in Asia as she ever was for the terri-
torial expansion of the czarist empire.

None of the countries of the Orient bordering
on Russia has entirely escaped bolshevist penetra-
tion. When Turkey suddenly resumed her
struggle against the Allies while Western Europe
was still countenancing the efforts of the Russian
“Whites” to wrest their country from the “Reds,”
Angora and Moscow were drawn together by their
common enmity to the Western powers. What-
ever the fundamental antagonism between the
Mohammedan conception of a strong theocratic
state, rooted in the principle of authority, spiritual
as well as temporal, and the bolshevist combination
of atheism and anarchism, the two chief figures
of Moscow and Angora, Lenin and Mustapha
Kemal, were to this extent at one, that they both
looked upon the Occident as the enemy, and were
both equally implacable in their determination
to crush what was called in Russia the “anti-
revolutionary”’ and in Turkey the “anti-national”
forces.

I will not labor the analogy between the war
waged by the new Turkish state against the ancient
institutions of Islam and the bolshevist persecu-
tion of the Russian Church, or between the
ruthless dictatorship of Lenin and that to which

[ 184 ]THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

Mustapha Kemal seems to have attained at
Angora. So long as a state of war existed between
Turkey and the Western powers it was easy for
Moscow and Angora to parade their friendship
in solemn treaties of amity and alliance. But
they both have separate ambitions which tend
to drive them asunder. Nationalism, often of the
most extravagant type has been the great driving
force in modern Turkey ever since the Revolution
of 1908, and soviet Russia has herself been rapidly

reer ENR ED Sennen ee Se

reverting to the czarist policy of expansion in
Asia, and not least in those regions which have
long been a battleground between Russia and
Turkey, or must eventually become so, if the
Pan-Turanian dreams of Turkish nationalists are
ever to be fulfilled.

At the outset soviet Russia emphatically
renounced before the whole world all the old
inheritance of czarist aggrandizement, and
promised to all the peoples of Asia, including
those who had been formerly subjects of Russia,
complete freedom to constitute themselves into
new and independent states in pursuance of the
fundamental doctrine of self-determination, which
bolshevism could alone be trusted to carry into
practice. Such counsels of perfection, even if
they were ever sincere, did not last very long, and

{ 185 |

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geTHE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Moscow soon decided that self-determination
must in any case be conditioned on the acceptance
of the revolutionary doctrines of bolshevism.
Today a half-dozen states on the Caucasian
borderland between Turkey and Russia, mostly
conquered in former times by Russia from Turkey,
have been successfully sovietized and affiliated so
closely with the Russian soviet that they are
actually as completely under Russian domination
as in the days of imperial Russia. But as we are
told to give even the devil his due, it is, one must
admit, in one of the sovietized republics of Trans-
caucasus that the name of Armenia, expunged
from the Treaty of Lausanne, alone survives
today.

All this has naturally caused considerable
perturbation at Angora, for a barrier has thus
been set up against the expansion of the Turkish
Republic in one direction toward which her own
militant nationalism was driving her. Already
at Lausanne there was a slight rift within the
lute. The representatives of Moscow and of
Angora did not at all see eye to eye on the question
of the Straits and the Black Sea, and though in
this case it was Moscow that had to yield, its
last word has assuredly not yet been said. For
there is little to distinguish the militarism and

{ 186 ]}THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

imperialism of soviet Russia of today from the
czarist Russia of yesterday.

Bolshevist propaganda among the Young Turks
probably achieved its greatest measure of success
at a great Oriental Congress held in Baku on the
Caspian in September, 1920, which was attended
by a large Turkish delegation as well as by
delegates from soviet Russia, from the Caucasian
states, from the north of Persia, and from Central
Asia. Many different languages were spoken at
this Congress, and the only words which every dele-
gate understood and the vast majority applauded
were “soviet” and “bolshevik.” Coming events
seem on that occasion to have cast their shadows
before, when Comrade Zinovieff, while congratulat-
ing Mustapha Kemal on his splendid fight against
capitalistic Europe, deplored the fact that his
government was not yet a communist government.
Addressing himself to the Turkish delegates, he
warned them not tobolster up the sultan’s authority
when the last hour had struck for all authority
everywhere, and he exhorted them on the contrary
to teach their people to shake off all faith in the
sultan in the same way as the Russian people
had shaken off all faith in the czar. Zinovieff,
today still one of the inner ring at Moscow,
boldly singled out for reprobation the language

{ 187 ]

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then quite recently held by Mustapha Kemal
himself at Angora where he had declared that
nothing would ever be done by him to impair
the sacred dignity of the sultan and khalif which
was above and beyond discussion. Comrade
Zinovieff may well have congratulated himself that
this warning had not fallen on deaf ears when not
so very long afterward Mustapha Kemal himself
destroyed both the sultanate and the khalifate.

In Persia conditions have been less favorable
to the spread of bolshevism. Anti-European
feeling may be only a degree less deep than in
Turkey. Sunk into almost hopeless decay under
corrupt and feeble rulers, the ancient kingdom
of Persia owed even more than the Ottoman
Empire its preservation in the nineteenth century
to the political rivalry of Britain and Russia,
fearful and distrustful of each other in the Middle
East as in the Near East. In the presence of the
growing German peril they finally composed
in 1907 their differences in Asia just as France and
Great Britain had for the same reason composed
their colonial differences in 1904. But they com-
posed them chiefly at the cost of such little 1n-
dependence as Persia still possessed.

The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 con-
verted northern Persia into a large Russian zone

{ 188 |i

ale

THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

of influence, and a smaller British zone was
created in southeastern Persia, with a sort of
neutral “no man’s land” between the two in
central Persia. Even so backward a people as
the Persians could not but resent being dealt
with in this offhand way as mere objects of

a eT ne a ee ae ee se

barter. There were some among them, too, who
had come into contact with Western ideas of
freedom and had acquired some knowledge of
the working of nationalist and even revolutionary
movements in Europe. The Persian nationalists
wrestled in the first place with the shah and wrung

Aer eae Be OT eee ees

from him the grant of a rudimentary parliament
at Teheran. But these concessions were as
distasteful to the autocratic traditions which he
had inherited from his ancestors as to his Russian
protectors.

Many Americans must be familiar with the
rather pathetic story of the fruitless struggle
which the immature Persian reformers tried to
wage against the combined influence of Russia
and of the reactionary elements in their own
country, while Great Britain was constrained by
considerations of European policy to look on
reluctantly and rather shamefacedly. For the
Persians, relying upon the disinterested impar-
tiality of America, had called in an American,

[ 189 J

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Shuster, to act as their financial adviser, and when
he retired, disgusted with the political situation in
Teheran which constantly defeated his attempts
to clean up the Augean stables of Persian finance,
he wrote a vigorous account of his mission which
created considerable sensation at the time. He
was perhaps not always quite fair to Russia or
to England, but in the main the situation which
he showed up was one that did no credit to either
power, though, on the other hand he was perhaps
inclined to deal’ rather too leniently with the
shortcomings of his Persian nationalist friends.
When the Great War broke out, the sympathies
of the Persian people were on the whole not with
the Western powers in whom they chiefly saw
the allies of Russia. After Turkey’s entry into
the war Persia found herself made a theater of
subsidiary military operations conducted upon
her territory with little or no regard for her
declared neutrality which she was herself powerless
to uphold. Turkish troops invaded her western
provinces and German and Austrian agents, some
of them consuls, merchants, and even professors,
who had been preparing the ground beforehand
during long residence in Persia, poured into the
country to raise bands of Persian mercenaries
whose activities were chiefly directed toward

[ 190 }THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

the southern provinces in which British influence
predominated. Von der Goltz himself came
across from Turkey with a large German and
Turkish staff to settle a great plan of campaign.
One large band under German leadership actually
penetrated into Persian Baluchistan which marches
with the extreme western frontiers of British
India. The British.organized counter-movements
from India with a stiffening of Indian troops and
finally cleared the nondescript hostile forces out
of southern Persia.

Meanwhile, a Russian army, moving down from
the north, had not only overawed the capital
when the shah had been at one moment on the
point of joining the German and Austrian ministers
and throwing in his lot with the Germanic powers,
but it had driven the Turks out of western Persia
and nearly joined hands with the British forces
in Mesopotamia. But the Russian forces melted
away there as on every other front under the
redhot breath of bolshevism.

When the Great War was over and Russia
had for the time being ceased to count, British
influence seemed for a time to be absolutely
supreme at Teheran, and the Persian government
readily subscribed to a new treaty with Britain
which practically placed the whole task of Persian

[ 191 }

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reconstruction in British hands. Lord Curzon,
who was the author of that treaty, had once more
underrated the latent strength of Persian national
feeling and also the rapid penetration of Russian
bolshevism from the Caucasus into northern
Persia and even into the capital, after the with-
drawal of the British forces that had at one time
reached the Caspian Sea. Even before the war
the Persian and Tatar elements in the Russian
Caucasus had played a conspicuous part in the
Persian nationalist movement, and after the war
they generally sided with the bolshevists in the
three-cornered hostilities between British and
Turkish and Russian bolshevist forces in the
Caucasus and on the Caspian littoral, where
soviet republics have since then been constituted.

How strong a hold on Persia bolshevism had
already got in 1920 may be gathered from the
fact that next to the Turkish delegation the
Persian delegation was numerically the strongest
at the Mohammedan Bolshevist Congress at
Baku to which I have already referred. Lord
Curzon’s treaty was used as a valuable weapon
for purposes of bolshevist propaganda, and, as
British ministers had never dreamed of imposing
it by force on Persia, they ended in wisely allowing
it to lapse altogether. The bolshevists, however,

| 192 |THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

naturally boasted that it was they who had killed
it, and a Russian soviet ambassador strutted for
a time through the streets of the Persian capital
as if it belonged to him.

But the rulers of Persia soon began to dread
soviet Russia as much as they had formerly
dreaded imperial Russia, and in Persia, which is
the only Shiah Mohammedan state in the Orient,
there is a powerful class which does not exist
in Sunni Mohammedan countries. Among the
Shiahs alone there is something closely resembling
an organizedpriestlyhierarchy. Extremely bigoted
and reactionary, the Persian priests, or Mujtahid,
soon took fright when they understood what
Russian bolshevism stands for.

Scarcely less frightened, though chiefly for
their own loaves and fishes, were the parasitic
classes from which the corrupt Persian officialdom
in the capital and in the provinces is chiefly
recruited. The shah himself, as worthless as
most of his predecessors, sought refuge from the
cares of state in chronic journeys to Europe which
merely increase the penury of the treasury.
But American advisers have been again called in
and have already done some good work, though
hampered by many obstructive forces as well as
by frequent changes in the Persian ministry.

{ 193 ]_ i ee a i tt Al atl oe etal

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Only within the last year or so has a figure
emerged from the welter of political intrigue in
Teheran who promises to give somewhat greater
stability to the feeble structure of government.
Riza Khan has some features in common with
the Turkish dictator. His origin is obscure and
his antecedents are not altogether commendable,
but he appears to have the same ruthless deter-
mination, and, for a Persian, very remarkable
powers of organization. He has for the first time
in our days created a Persian army capable at
least of maintaining order at home, and he is by
all. accounts the strongest prime minister that
modern Persia has ever had. Like Mustapha
Kemal, he appeals to the nationalism of his people,
and three months ago he was believed to be on the
point of following the Turkish dictator’s example
by deposing the shah and proclaiming a Persian
republic. There, however, he found himself
confronted with the intense conservatism of the
Persian priesthood, who countered him with a
solemn declaration that a republic was incom-
patible with the fundamental principles of the
Mohammedan religion. Riza Khan was wise
enough to give way for the time being and an
official assurance was issued that there would be
no republic. The dictator went through the form

I 194 ]THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

of resignation but the short-lived crisis ended
with his resumption of the premiership. Whatever
his ambitions may be, these are not likely ever
to favor bolshevism, though it still carries on an
active propaganda through its own organs in
the Persian press, and the latest accounts point
to a recrudescence of Republican agitation, di-
rected now not only against the shah who still
tarries in Europe, but even against the dictator
himself.

Whatever may be the case in Persia, it is
dificult to believe that Afghanistan provides a
congenial soil for bolshevism. Like its Persian
neighbor with whom in former times it was
constantly in conflict, Afghanistan has figured
chiefly in modern history as a buffer state between
the Russian and the British empires in Asia, and
three times during the nineteenth century the
British went to war with Afghanistan in order
to check the growth of Russian influence at
Kabul, the capital. They were costly wars, and
the first one had a disastrous epilogue when 1n
1842, after having successfully occupied Kabul,
the small British Indian force was almost com-
pletely annihilated before it could get back to
India. Two other British expeditions in 1878-80
ended after costly vicissitudes in establishing on

[ 195 |

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the throne of Kabul a ruler, Abdul Rahman
Khan, who was shrewd enough to realize the value
of a powerful neighbor’s protection and was
satisfied to leave the control of his foreign relations
in the hands of the government of India in return
for a handsome subsidy and full rights of rulership
within his dominions.

On this basis things proceeded fairly smoothly
until the Afghans were led to believe that the old
Russian menace had disappeared with the Russian
Revolution, and that they could even count on
the support of their new bolshevist friends if
they broke with India. In March, 1919, a new
ameer, Amanulla Khan, announced his accession
with all the customary protestations of friendship to
Britain and India. But the disorders with which
the British were just then suddenly and almost
simultaneously confronted in Northern India, in
Mesopotamia, and in Egypt, and of which the
gravity was enormously magnified by bolshevist
propaganda, encouraged him to change his tune
abruptly, and only a month later he proclaimed
a holy war, and boastfully summoned his tribes to
follow him as they had more than once followed his
ancestors to the facile conquest of the fat plains of
India. The Afghan forces were promptly repulsed,
and before the end of May the ameer was asking

{ 196 JTHE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

for peace, which was formally concluded early in
August.

But though defeated in the field, the Afghan
ruler achieved what had probably been his own
chief purpose. The comforting word “‘self-deter-
mination” had reached even to Kabul, and he
construed it to his own satisfaction as covering his
claim to recognition as an absolutely independent
sovereign. This satisfaction the government of
India was quite ready to concede to him as, with
the disappearance of imperial Russia, it saw no
further need to subsidize Afghanistan as a buffer
state or to assume any of the responsibilities
implied in the control of its foreign relations,
which might have led to awkward entanglements
with bolshevist Russia pulling the strings at
Kabul. The complete independence of Afghan-
istan was recognized, and though the first use
made of his independence by the ameer, or
“king,” as he was now styled, was to sign a treaty
of amity and alliance with soviet Russia, he
redressed the balance by welcoming a British
mission to Kabul and accrediting an Afghan
representative in London.

The king has an uneasy time with the rather
loose agglomeration of unruly tribes that make up
Afghanistan, and his genuine desire to introduce

[ 197 |THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

certain rudimentary reforms into his administra-
tion together with increased taxation has already
landed him in serious trouble with them. The
influence exercised on public affairs by his wife,
who is a very “advanced” lady, is in itself a stone
of offense in a Mohammedan country in which
women have hitherto been kept in rigid subjection.
There is frequent friction, too, between the few
Europeans whom he has taken into his service
as he has imported them mostly from Germany
and from France in order to prevent any one
group acquiring exclusive influence. Though he
coquetted with soviet Russia so long as he was less
afraid of her than of British power in India, he is
much too autocratic a ruler to have any real
sympathy with bolshevism, and in the havoc which
bolshevism has wrought in Central Asia he has
had too many unpleasant object lessons at his
very door.

Bolshevism has poured forth over the whole of
Central Asia like a devastating flood. I have had
occasion to allude more than once to Russian
expansion in Asia in the old days of the czars
and its effects upon British policy toward Turkey.
Not only had imperial Russia possessed herself
of the whole of Siberia and Northern Asia right
away to,the Pacific, but she had steadily absorbed

{ 198 ]THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

or brought under her overlordship all the Moham-
medan states of Central Asia down to the land
frontiers of British India as well as along the
borderlands of Afghanistan and Persia. The
Russians maintained order and did a great deal
for the material development of the country
which they linked up by two separate railways
with the Caspian as well as with their great
Siberian trunk line. In all the chief cities there
were large Russian garrisons and in some of them
considerable Russian settlements, in which there
was generally a nucleus of political exiles banished
from European Russia. The Russian Revolution
shook the whole fabric of Russian domination.
The people of Central Asia, all Mohammedans,
saw in it an opportunity to shake off an alien
and infidel yoke, and soviet Russia encouraged
them at first to believe that she would not block
their way to freedom.

One of Lenin’s earliest measures was to issue a
decree proclaiming for all peoples, and not least for
all oriental peoples, the right of self-determination.
But when Moscow proceeded to organize its vast
system of bolshevist propaganda, it was nowhere
more active than in Central Asia. In 1920 a
Communist University of Workers in the East
was founded in Moscow under the direction of

[ 199 |

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Comrade Broyodo, who had formerly been a
lawyer at Tashkend, and branches were soon
opened at Tashkend, Baku, and Irkutsk. That
of Tashkend, the former seat of Russian govern-
ment in Central Asia, soon had over 300 students,
and there was a special school for women.

Education was based exclusively on communist
principles, and translations from the works of
Lenin, Kautsky, and Stalin as well as Karl Marx
were made into the chief Central Asian vernaculars
for the use of students and for general distribution.
Some of the older Russian Orientalists were
commandeered to form a new scientific association
on bolshevist lines as one of the sections of the
Commissariat of Nationalities under whose control
were placed a number of subsidized institutions
created for or readapted to bolshevist propaganda.
The remnants of the old Russian garrisons and
bureaucracy in Central Asia were at the same time
impressed into the service of bolshevism. A
number of vernacular newspapers were started
to preach bolshevist doctrine and even the theaters
and cinemas were mobilized. At the bolshevist
schools, which sprang up like mushrooms, Moham-
medan boys were taught to look henceforth to
Moscow as the Mecca and Medina from which
salvation would come to Islam.

{ 200 }THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

As in the Caucasus, the various nationalities
of Central Asia were encouraged to constitute
themselves into soviet republics, e.g., the soviet
republic of Khorezm, once the khanate of Khiva;
the soviet republic of Turkestan, with Tashkend
as its capital; the soviet republic of Bokhara,
also formerly a khanate. Moscow allowed them
for a time to enjoy the illusion of independence,
but very soon soviet Russia reverted to the old
traditions of czarist Russia, which it had originally
repudiated as incompatible with its mission of
world-liberation. The old Russian agencies as
well as the political exiles were employed to preach
close affiliation with the Russian union of soviet
republics. They were speedily reinforced by
commissars from Moscow, accompanied or followed
by Red armies and sooner or later treaties,
so-called, of alliance, imposed upon the new
sovietized republics, brought them once more
under the domination of soviet Russia which was
no less effective and far more tyrannical than that
of czarist Russia had ever been. Risings followed
which were ruthlessly crushed, and devastating
famines and wholesale ruin.

We need go no farther for evidence than to the
official organs of the Moscow government. The
Izvestia itself once described at great length and

{ 201 |THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

with quite unaccustomed frankness the endless pro-
cession of carts with half-naked and more than
half-starved people streaming across the Kirghiz
steppes to Orenburg. The mortality among chil-
dren reached 80 per cent. The living, it said,
were killed; the dead were dug up for human
food. Khiva was pillaged in turn by Turkoman
tribes and by Red troops. In the soviet republic
of Tashkend, Kokhand, “the charming,” a city
of over 80,000 inhabitants which had become
‘ under czarist rule the flourishing center of the
great cotton-growing area of Ferghana, was
taken, pillaged, and burned by the Reds, and
10,000 Mohammedans were massacred, not of
course as Mohammedans but as counter-revolu-
tionaries.

Repeated and sanguinary rebellions and repres-
sions ravaged the large state of Bokhara, and the
ameer, whom czarist Russia had always recognized
as a semi-independent feudatory, had to take
refuge in Afghanistan. Before death carried him
off, the famous Enver Pasha flitted across the
blood-stained stage, first as an ally of the bolshey-
ists and then as the leader of a Mohammedan
revolt against them. The history of Central Asia
during the last five years is a confused and still
largely obscured record of destruction and anarchy,

{ 202 }THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

with bolshevism, however, still triumphantly rid-
ing the whirlwind.

In oriental countries farther removed from
Russia, such as India, bolshevism makes its way
underground to the congested urban slums into
which the growth of modern industrialism has
too often packed. its unskilled workers, only
half-weaned by the attraction of higher wages
from their former village life, almost wholly illiter-
ate and densely ignorant, unorganized, and, until
recent legislation for the protection of labor, largely
at the mercy of an equally new and irresponsible
class of Indian employers, slow to acquire the
sense of duty to their men which British employers
for the most part bring with them to India.

Gandhi may denounce industrialism and com-
mercialism as among the most Satanic gifts of the
Occident. But they have come to India to stay.
Indian industry and Indian trade received a
tremendous impetus during the war when the
great natural resources of the country were for
the first time systematically explored and devel-
oped for purposes of war production. Indians
are now coming to the front at the head of
great commercial and industrial enterprises who
are in many ways qualified to compete with the
best Europeans. The Tatars, for instance, have

[ 203 |

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‘|THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

created at Jamshidpur in Bengal, round their
splendidly equipped iron and steel works, an
industrial city which will bear comparison with
anything we can showin England. Fiscal freedom
has been granted to India under her new constitu-
tional charter, and many Swarajists who profess
to be in other respects devoted followers of Gandhi
have parted company with him on this point.
They have placed the protection of Indian indus-
tries and trade in the forefront of their program,
and, although they still call themselves non-
co-operators, they have found themselves during
the last legislative session at Delhi voting in the
same lobby as the government in support of tariff
measures which they attacked only as falling
short of the high tariff wall they would like to
build up against foreign and especially, of course,
against British competing imports.

Indian labor, in the meantime, has yet to be
organized on efficient lines, and, as it has so far
produced no leaders of its own, the trade unions
which are springing up like mushrooms are mainly
in the hands of professional agitators who might
almost have themselves graduated at Moscow.
For Moscow boasts of the special attention devoted
in its various oriental colleges to the training
of bolshevist ‘“‘missionaries” with the requisite

[ 204 ]THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

knowledge to arouse as its organ the Novy Vostok,
or New East, puts it: “the whole colonial world
of the oppressed not only in Asia but in Africa
and America against the capitalistic society of
Europe and the United States.”

The Orient and the Occident are being drawn
together by all the mechanical appliances of
Western civilization. Telegraphs and wireless,
fast steamers, railways, and motor roads are
annihilating distance and time. Outwardly the
chief cities of the Orient have adopted or are
adopting most of the material equipment of
European cities. In many directions intellectual
intercourse between the Occident and the Orient
is increasing every day. In almost every oriental
country there has grown up a Western-educated
class that can speak and read and write, sometimes
quite admirably, one or other of our Western
languages, more especially English. There are
judges and lawyers, doctors and engineers, men
of letters and men of science, capable of competing
in their own field with the men of the Occident
who have been their teachers. The textbooks
in schools and colleges are for the most part
borrowed from the Occident, and it is to occidental
research that the Orient owes even its much larger
knowledge today of its own past history.

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Many Orientals have been brought up almost
exclusively on occidental literature of which at
first at any rate they preferred the best. Today
unfortunately the popular bookstalls of the
Orient are littered with its worst, often in vernacu-
lar translations, just as cinemas generally parade
the worst possible pictures of occidental life.
The influence of the press, itself an entirely
modern production imported from the Occident,
has become ubiquitous. In India many of the
leading newspapers, owned and edited by Indians,
are written and published in English, though the
reverse of English in spirit and tone, and give the
cue to innumerable vernacular newspapers far
more crude and violent. Under the stimulus of
the Occident, the Orient is learning to develop
its immense resources, and the markets of the
Orient, more and more closely linked up in trade
and industry and finance with those of the
Occident, respond automatically to every wave
of prosperity and depression that beats upon them
from London or Paris or New York

Western education has been for the Orient
the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Whether
the good shall prevail over the evil constitutes
the supreme test to which the civilization of the
Occident as a whole—the civilization that is as

{| 206 |THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM.

much that of America as of Europe—is being
subjected today throughout the Orient. It is
not merely or mainly the political ascendancy of
any one European power over these or those
peoples of the Orient that is at stake. It is not
merely or mainly whether President Wilson’s
formula of “self-determination” is, or was intended
to be, applicable to the nations of the Orient whose
independence might very well mean merely a
reversion to oriental forms of society and govern-
ment entirely incompatible with any fruitful
relations with the Occident. The fundamental
issue 1s whether the Orient can be brought to adapt
itself to that democratic type of human society
which the most progressive nations of the Occident
have gradually evolved as affording the largest
opportunities for individual and collective freedom
combined with the restraining sense of individual
and collective responsibility.

If one seeks to define what the Orient chiefly
lacks, and has always lacked, it is the practice of
freedom with the sense of responsibility, or, in
one word, character. Almost the only forms of
government it has ever known have been theocracy
and autocracy with alternating periods of license
and anarchy. Nothing can be more undemocratic
than the Hindu caste system which still holds a

[ 207 J

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creat part of India in its grip,and Mohammedanism
has never risen beyond the conception of brother-
hood in the faith within the Mohammedan world—
a brotherhood that has constantly broken down
in practice—and of the whole non-Mohammedan
world as an irreconcilable world of war. It is,
nevertheless, among Hindus that some of the
finest intellects have been drawn into closer
spiritual communion with the Occident than in
any other part of the Orient—perhaps because
Mohammedanism is not the dominating factor in
India—and there are no dogmatic limitations to the
elasticity and eclecticism of Hindu philosophies.
But nowhere, on the other hand, is the repudia-
tion of all spiritual communion with the Occident
louder and more emphatic than it is today in
India.

Turkey speaks with another voice, for she has
never believedin anything but the sword. All she
has borrowed from the Occident is a fierce and nar-
row nationalism, so narrow that it would seem to be
a reversion to the primitive tribalism of the Cen-
tral Asian hordes that were her forebears. In the
new Turkish state we have seen this fanatically
Turkish nationalism carried to such lengths that
it has not only savagely rid its soil of all
alien races at the imminent risk of economic

{ 208 }}THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

suicide, but it has even cut itself adrift from the
brotherhood of Islam in order to dig itself in
the more securely against all contact with the

non-Turkish Orient as well as with the Occi-

dent.

The Arabs have at least once in the course of
history evolved a civilization which found some
points of genuine contact with the Occident, and
rose, though only for a short time, superior to the
rigid dogmatism of their Mohammedan creed.
Are they capable of doing so again should they
recover with the now vacant khalifate the leader-
ship of Islam which they wielded for many cen-
turies before the Turks wrested it from them?
Or will Islam continue to be what it has gradually
come to be among almost all Arabs—an element
of passive rather than of active resistance to the
Occident ?

In Asia and in Africa all the ancient lands of
the Arab khalifate have passed within the last
century under the political control of Western
powers, whether by annexation, as in Algeria
and Tripoli, or under foreign protectorates, as in
Morocco and Tunis, or under the mandatory
system as in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. Egypt
alone has secured a formal recognition of her
independence, but British troops still continue

[ 209 ]

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osTHE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

to garrison her two chief cities. In most of these
Arab lands the tutelage of Western nations is
now undoubtedly deeply and sometimes fiercely
resented, but not so much because its benefits
during an admittedly transitional period are
denied as because with their growing sense of
nationhood, which they owe to the Occident, they
claim to have learned enough to dispense with
its leading strings. But even among the Arabs
there is beneath the surface a much deeper and
more passionate resentment which explodes from
time to time with elemental energy.

All the manifold discontents of the Orient are
bound up together in the clash of color. This is
nothing new. Nature herself is responsible for it,
since she gave a generally white complexion to
all the peoples of the Occident and, in varying
degrees, a darker complexion to all those of the
Orient. But it has acquired a dangerous signifi-
cance with the white man’s assumption of superior
and indefeasible rights based on the superiority
of his race. He may couple the exercise of those
rights with a fine sense of duty toward the colored
races which he regards as his inferiors, as Kipling
implied when he .wrote of the “white man’s
burden.” But, rightly or wrongly, the Oriental,
who for a time admitted and acquiesced with

{ 210 }THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

almost fatalistic resignation, in the white man’s
superiority, denies it today—denies it sometimes
passionately—for all his atavistic instincts, react-
ing against the aggressive impact of occidental
civilization, rebel as never before against it;

?

 

sometimes contemptuously because increasing
intercourse has made him too familiar with the
seamy side of our civilization; sometimes though
alas! more rarely because he has assimilated enough
of its finer spirit to claim the rights of equal
partnership in all that is best of it.

So long as personal intercourse between the
Occident and the Orient was confined within very
narrow limits, the white man laid much less stress
than he does today on mere racial superiority.
To India, for instance, England has sent out on the
whole her best. Social intercourse between people
of different races with different beliefs and differ-
ent customs and different domestic institutions
was always difficult, but it has become far more
difficult now that increased facilities of communica-
tion and the introduction of modern scientific
appliances and industrial trading methods have
led to the employment in subordinate capacities
of a type of Europeans formerly almost unknown
to the Orient, but now very much in evidence,
with plenty of good qualities, but more prone than

{ 211

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those of better breeding and education to boast
of their racial superiority and to impress their
sense of it somewhat roughly upon the Indians
or other Orientals with whom they rub shoulders.
It cannot be denied that racial hatred has often
had its origin in the rancor created by personal
insults to which the natives of oriental countries
even of good position have occasionally been
subjected by white men who fancied themselves,
but were not, their betters. Industrial competi-
tion, at the same time, has intensified so rapidly
all the world over that the Occident has been
seized with a great fear lest it should be swamped
by the cheaper labor and lower standards of
life of the countless millions of the Orient which
it has itself equipped to become its competi-
tors.

I have touched only on that part of the Orient
which has been for many centuries interlocked
in history with the Occident, but the same line
of racial cleavage is deepening even in those
countries of the farther Orient—China and Japan—
which I have excluded from my purview, because,
having their own great civilizations, they lived
their own lives, almost within the memory of
living man in almost complete isolation from the
Occident, until Europe and America, too, went

{ 212 ]THE NEW FACTOR OF BOLSHEVISM

and thundered at their gates. Today the racial
issue is raised all over the world.

In this country you have the color problem in
your very midst. You have it again at your doors
in the shape of Asiatic immigration. We in
Europe are confronted with it, as I have tried to
show you, along the great borderland of the
Occident and Orient extending through Northern
Africa and across Western and Central Asia,
from the northwestern Atlantic to the shores of the
Indian Ocean, even beyond. Its solution bristles
with difficulties, but, for my own part, I refuse to
dismiss itasinsoluble. I willsay this, at any rates
that the more firmly we ourselves believe in the
superiority of a civilization which, so far, it has
been the privilege of the white man to build up
in his occidental homelands, the more are we
bound by its principles and the principles of the
common Christianity which are its one sure
foundation to do all in our power to temper the
bitterness of a racial discord which, if it spreads
and deepens, may threaten the future of the whole
human race.

Often as our own practice may have fallen
short of our ideals, the common civilization of
the Occident, to which America belongs quite
as much as Europe, must surely set before us

{ 213 |

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definite ideals for which we should all strive as
nations and as individuals. May I conclude by
quoting to you the words in which those ideals
have been so admirably expressed by one of my
own fellow-countrymen that the late president
of the United States, Mr. Harding, himself
quoted them as “seeming to point to the true
way out.” Sir Frederick Lugard says:

Here then is the true conception of the interrelation of
colour: complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in
the paths of knowledge and culture; equal opportunity for
those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve;
in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his
own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity and
race-pride; equality in things spiritual, agreed divergence in
the physical and material.

In uttering those words Lugard was referring
chiefly to Africa, where he earned his great
reputation by practicing what he taught. But
they afford, I think, equally wise guidance for
the solution everywhere of the race problem upon
which today more than ever before depends the
peaceful readjustment of the relations between
the Occident and the Orient, of which I have
tried, however inadequately, to sketch the chief
vicissitudes and the long evolution in history
down to our own times.

[ 214 J‘J

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Faber i To

NEI te rn om = ToC

IS i ence

INDEX

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‘INDEX

Abbas Hilmi, 83, 84
Abbaside dynasty, 24
Abdul Hamid, 42, 58, 59, 140

Abdul Hamid II, 43, 45, 47, 48;
successor tO, 49

Abdul Rahman Khan, 196

Abdul-Walid-Ibn-Rushd, 16

Abu Bekr, Io, 11

Abyssinia, 75

Adly Pasha, 93, 95

Adrianople, 21, 35

Afghanistan, 50, 195, 197, 199,
202

Afghans, 196

Africa, 205, 214

Agadir, 156

Akbar, 116

Albanians, 45

Alexander the Great, 37, 109

Alexander II, 41

Alexandria, 14, 74, 77, 91, 99

Algeciras, 155

Algeria, 156, 209; annexation of,
149; conquest of, 154

Algiers, 23, 149

Ali, 11, 129

Allenby, Lord, 88, 97, 171

Allied and Associated Powers,
56, 57, 86, 89, 164, 171

Allies, 51, 53, 57, 64, 85, 140,
166, 170, 177

Almohad princes, 16

Amanulla Khan, 196

Ameer-el-Mouminin, 60

America, 27 f., 30, 54, 178, 189,
205. 207 212) One sseand
Armenian mandate, $4, 55;
Zionism in, 175; see United
States

American advisers, 190, 193

American Civil War, 73

American mandate, 171

American Relief Committee, 53

Amritzar, 137

Anglo-Egyptian relations, 94

Anglo-French Convention of
1904, 155

Anglo-French jealousies, 172

Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, 133

Anglo-Russian agreement, 188

Angora, 20, 58, 62, 104, 142, 184,
186, 188; capital of Turkish
Republic, 20

Antioch, 14

Arab, Assembly, 167; blood,
151; conquerors, 19; Empire,
71; independent, state, 170,
171, 177; provinces, 178; sci-
ence, 15; world,150; writers, 15

Arabi, rebellion of, 77; Saad
Zaghlul Pasha, a follower of, 82

Arabia, 9, 44,166; Wahabis of,72
Arabic, 14, 15, 18

{ 217 ]THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Arabs, 5, 12, 13, 25; of the
Hejaz, 170; of Iraq, 166;
in Syria and Palestine, 170

Aristotle translated, 15, 16, 18

Armenia, vii, $3, 186

Armenian massacres, 47, 52

Armenian question, 48

Armenians, 58, 61; in Asia
Minor, 65

Armies, African, 160; British,
55, 58, 63; 77 f., 88, 91, 99; 1345
169, 176, I91, 209; French,
55, 134, 160, 176; Greek, 56,
57> 58; 64; Indian, 1345
Italian, 56; Persian, 194;
Red, 201; Russian, 191; Turk-
ish, 455 46, $4, 72, 171, Igo

Armistice, 55, 86

Art and literature, 14, 15

Aryans, 121

Asia, 37, 48, 184, 188, 195, 198,
205; Central, 187, 199, 202;
Minor, 23, 28, 52, 53, 54) 55,
60, 64, 66

Asquith, prime minister, 134

Assassinations, political, 132

Atlas Mountains, 151, 157, 161

Austria, 35, 46, 84, 191

Autonomy, 134, 149, 177

Averroes, 16, 17, 18

Aviation, British military, 99

Avicenna, 15

Bacon, Roger, 18

Baghdad, 145 (ss 16, 7 168:
Abbaside dynasty of, 24;
Railway concession, 48

Baku, 187, 192, 200

Balfour Declaration, 172, 174

Balkan peninsula, 35, 36

Balkan states, 23, 36, 67

Balkan Wars of 1912-13, 50, 140

Baluchistan, 19%

Baring, Sir Evelyn, 79; see
Lord Cromer

Beaconsfield, Lord, 140

Beer, George Louis, 165

Beirut, 170

Bengal, 117, 142, 204

Berbers, 151, 157

Bismarck, 46

Black Sea, 20, 23, 186

Bokhara, 15, 202; soviet re-
public of, 201

Bolshevism, 64, 183, 185, 186,
192, 198, 203; in Central
Asia, 187; in Persia, 188, 192,
Tos) sRussianie  192e/msce
Oriental Congress

Bolshevist influences, 64, 192

Bolshevist propaganda, 192, 200

Bolshevist schools, 200

Bombay, III

Bosporus, 60

Brahmans, 121, 122 f., 124

“British control,” 79, 81, 82, 83,
gO, 92, 97; I7ls* uprising
against, 142

British Empire, 60, 78, 98, 141;
in Asia, 195; naval power, 37,
55, 113; Parliament, 135

British Indian Empire, 115, 116,
199; expeditions, 195

{ 218 }INDEX

Bryce, Lord, 51

Bryodo, Comrade, 200

Buffer state, 195, 197

Bulgaria, 36

Bulgarian atrocities of 1876, 41
Bulgars, 20

Bunnias, 137

Byzantine Empire, 12, 20, 71

Cabot, John, 30

= Gare. the, 25

Cairo, 16, 29, 78, 84, 86, 88, 89,
91, 99

Calcutta, 111, 144; university
at, 126

Canning, Sir Stratford, 38, 39

Cantacuzene, 21

Cape of Good Hope, 29, 37, 109

“Capitalistic society,” 205

“Capitulations,’ 22, 66, 99;
system of, 100

Caste, 120; Bunnias, 137; Brah-
minical, 121; Hindu, 207;
relaxation of, 122

Catharine of Braganza, 153

Catherine the Great, 25

Caucasus, the, 192, 201

Chanak, 58

Charles II, King, 153

Chelmsford, Lord, 135

China, 212

Christendom, 22; militant, 18;
Western, 24

Christianity, 6, 7, 13, 17, 213
Christian subject races, 26, 34,
38; 47; 50

Christians, 34

Civilization, 4; Andalusian, 151;
Arab, 209; Christian, 22;
Greek and Roman, 6, 12, 13;
Hindu, 124; Mohammedan,
18, 150; of the Occident, 18,
2133 oriental, 136, ‘212;
Persian, 13; Western, 5, 104,
120, 146, 162, 183, 205

Clive, Lord, 117, 125

Codrington, Admiral, 35

Color problem, 213

Columbus, Christopher, 28, 29,
30

“Comity of civilized nations,” 40

Commisariat of Nationalities,
200

Commission of Inquiry, 89, 95;
Lord Milner’s, 91, 94, 96

Communications, security of, 98

Communist University of Work-
ers, 199

“Concert of Europe,” 42, 47

Congo, French, 156

Congress of Vienna, 33

Connaught, Duke of, 136

Constantinople, 12, 19, 21, 22,

24, 27, 29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45;
46, 53; 58, 60, 61, 62, 104, 170,

171
Constitution, 44, 99, 136, 146
Constitutional charter, 136, 146
Cordova, 15, 16
Council of Ministers, 61
Crimean War, 40, 140
Cromer, Lord, 79 f., 82, 83, 90
Crusades, 19; First, 20; Last, 21

{ 219 ]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Crusaders, Latin, 19; Western,
21

Culture, Islamic, 15; Saracenic,
17; see Civilization

Curzon, Lord, 192

Cyprus, island of, 42

Czar, Russian, 187

Damascus, II, 14, 16, 47, 176;
Arab flag at, 171

Dardanelles, 60

Dar-el-Harb, 7

Dar-ul-Islam, 7

Das, 144

Delhi, 123, 141, 204; capital,
133; government at, 14$

Deportation, mass, §2

Disraeli, 41

Druse country, 177

Dupleix, 113

Dyer, General, 137

East India Company, 110, 113,
II7, I19, 125; policy of, 114
East Indies, 110, 112

Education, Western, 73, 77, 82,
TOO, TT; £20, )129) 1265) 0c
1375) As; 164, 170; 206;
English teaching in, 127 f.

Egypt, 23, 245 37, 71, 73, 78, 87,
88, 89, 196; aviation base, 99;
autonomy for, 72; Bonaparte’s
invasion, 72; British occupa-
tion, 78; British protectorate
terminated, 98; constitution
for, 99; control of economic
life, 100; cotton-growing in,

73; credit of, 75; financial

control of, 76; independence,

72, 86, 89, 92, 97, 98, 2093
Lord Cromer i in, 79 ff.; under

martial law, 85; in the Middle
Ages, 150; recognized as free
state, 98; self-government in,
94; Treaty of Alliance with
Great Britain, 94, 167; Turk-
ish sovereignty over, 84

Egyptian cabinet, 83, 87

Egyptian government, 89, 98,
IOI

Egyptians, 51

Elections, 99, 136, 143, 1443
boycott of, 138

Elizabeth, Queen, I10

El-Mamun, 15

England, 30, 35, 40, 46, 57, 60,
76, 81, 89, 92, 96, IOI, 105,
II4, 17, 192) 152, TOC setae
190

English, 72, 109; newspapers in,
206; teaching in, 127 f.

Enver Pasha, 50, 52, 171, 202

Europe, 37; 44, 48, 73, 156, 193;
205, 207; territories outside,
164

European money, 75

European trade, 28

Evkaf, 62
Extremists, 144

Factories, 111

Fanaticism, religious, 65; Mo-
hammedan, 77

Feisal, Arab king, 167, 176

Ferghana, 202

Fez, 152, 153, 156

{ 220 ]INDEX

Financial obligations, 66
Financiers, 66;
London, 75

Foreign Legion, 160, 161

Foreign relations, 149, 150, 158,
167, 196, 197

Foreign trade, 153

Brances 12.24, 95.172...70, 0775
89, 113, 114, 151, 154, 166, 170,
176, 188, 198; mandate for
Syria, 176

French in Algiers, the, 149 f.; in
Egypt, 72; 1n India, 112

French Revolution, 35

French scientific mission, 72

Fuad, King, 99,103,104; Prince, 85

of Paris and

Gallipoli, 63

Gandhi, Mahatma, 137,
141, 142, 143, 203, 204

Genoa, 28

George, Lloyd; see Lloyd George

George, King, 133, 136

German Military Mission, 64

Germany, 33, 46, 50, 84, 155,
156, 198

Gibraltar, 157

Giralda, 151

Gladstone, 41

Goltz, von der, 191

Gordon, 102

Government of India Bill, 135

Granada, 16, 151

Grand National Assembly, 58,
61, 62; president of the, 61

Grand Vizier, 62; a Tunisian, 45

138,

Great Britain, 39, 42, 72, 77,
93, 94, 154, 177, 188, 196;
mandate for Iraq, 167, 176;
mandate for Palestine, 176;
see England

Great War, 4, 50, 51, 54, 57, 64,
84, 133, 140, 141, 146, 166, 171,
190; after the, 54, 160, 164

Greece, 35, 533
state, 36

Greek authors, translated, 14

independent

Greek civilization, 6, 12, 13, 66
Greek disasters, 64

Greek war of independence, 36
Greeks, 35, 58; ancient, 6, 28, 66;

of Asia Minor, 61, 65; of the
Morea, 72

Hadith (Traditions), 9

Hamidian Pan-Islamism, 57

Hamidian policy, 51

Harding, President, 214

Hardinge, Lord, 133

Haroun-el-Rashid, 14

Hauran, 177

Hejaz, 166, 176, 177

Hejaz Railway, 48

Hindu philosophy, 208

Hinduism, 120, 137; as a social
system, 120

Hindus, 123, 125

Holy Alliance, 33

Holy Land, 19, 20

Holy War, 51, 196
Hungary, 23

Hussein, Prince, 85, 177

{ 221 |]ey tO ee

Ren Kees

net.

 

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 15

Ilbert Bill, 129

Imam-el-Kebir, 10

Imperial Conference, 99

India’ 12,5120, 30, 73, 109; 110;
196, 198, 203; British Empire
Of sto, 195 ator; . british
experiment in, 146; British
policy in, 135; British rule in,
IIS, 125, 135; civilization of,
IIo; constitutional charter,
136; Dutch in, 112; early
British settlements in, 30;
French in, 112, 113; govern-
ment of, 118, 127, 135 f., 140,
149, 197; Hindu caste, 207;
invasion of, 37, 109; independ-
ence, 137 142; iron and steel,
204; Mohammedan domina-
tion, 142; mutiny, 74, 126,
129; newspapers, 206; peace
and progress, 126; period of
transition, 146; Portuguese in,
109, 112; Russian power in,
39;self-government, 144; trade
and industry, 203; twenty
different languages, 128; vice-
roy, 126; visit of King George
and Queen Mary, 133; visit of
Prince of Wales, 143

Indian Councils Act, 133

Indian High Commissioner, 145

Indian National Congress, 130,
139, 144

Indian popular assembly, 136

Indians, 5, 29, 51, 130

Industrial competition, 212

International administration of

Tangier, 157

International law, 78
International problems, 3
International relations, 33

Iraq, 166, 167, 169, 209; Assem-
bly, 169; independence of, 167,
168; mandate for, 167; see
Mesopotamia

Irkutsk, 200

Islam, 6, 7, 9, 12, 18, 44, 50, 140,
141, 151, 184, 200, 209; Arab,
27; dominant in India, 116;
headship of, 10, 25; sword of,
7,12, 16, 115,142; triumph of,
29; Turkish, 27, 69)3) sesee
Mohammedanism

Ismail, Khedive, 74, 75, 76,
77 £f., 81, 103

Italy, 33, 77

Izvestia, 201

Jamshidpur, 204
Janissaries, the, 26, 34
Japan, 132, 212

Fehad (holy war), 51
Jerusalem, 47, 173

Jews, 49
Judaism, 7

Kabul, 195, 196, 197
Kali, goddess, 131
Kautsky, 200

Kemal, Mustapha; see Musta-
pha Kemal

Khalif, temporal power, 59; title
of, 24

Khalifa-Rassul-Allah, 10

{ 222 |INDEX

Khalifate, 11, 12, 43, 58, 59, 188,
209; Abbaside, 14; abolition
of, 62, 142; Arab, 20, 209;
future of, 104; Indian, 139;
Islamic, 24; movement, 10,
140, 141; Ommayad, 14;
Ottoman, 63, 67; separate at
Cordova, 15, 16; Turkish,
42, 45, 51, 57, 67, 152

Khanate, 201

Khartum, 102

Khedive, Ismail, 74, 75, 76,
77 £.; Tewfik, 77

Khiva, 201, 202

Khorezm, soviet republic of, 201
Kirghiz steppes, 202

Kitchener, Lord, 84, 102
Kokhand, 202

Koran, 8, 9, 12, 63

Koreish tribe, 10

Kurdistan, Mountains of, 168
Kurds, 45

Kutubia, 151

Lausanne, 141, 168, 186; see
Treaties

League of Nations, vii, 60, 118,

164, 168, 169, 170, 177, 179;
covenant of, 172

Lebanon, 175, 177
Legislative Council, 175
Legislature, All-Indian, 135
Lenin, 64, 184, 199, 200
Lepanto, 35

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 74

Lloyd George, 55, 56, 95, 97,
98, 99, 134

London, 85, 206
Lugard, Sir Frederick, 214

Lyautey, Marshall, 158, 160,
161, 163

Macaulay, 119; at Calcutta, 119

Madras, 111, 119

Mahdi, ror

Malabar coast, 141

Malta, 41, 88, 89, 140

Mameluke sultans, 24, 29

Mandate, for Iraq, 167, 176;
French, 175; for Syria and
Palestine, 172, 176, 177

Mandates, 149, 169

Mandatory power, 170

Mandatory system, 164, 175,
209; Syria under, 171, 177, 178

Maronites, 175

Marrakesh, 151, 153

Marx, Karl, 200

Mary, Queen, 133

Massacre, 52, 53

Mecca, 166, 200; sherif of, 141

Medersas, of Fez, 151

Medina, 200

Mediterranean, 23, 28, 37, 71, 74

Merchants, 66

Mesopotamia, 51, 55, 166, 191,
196; see Iraq

Middle Ages, 15, 28, 150

Midhat Pasha, 44

Milner, Lord, 90, 93, 167;
Report of, 98

Minorities, protection of, 98
Minority, at Baghdad, 168

[ 223 J

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Moghul Empire, 111, 112, 145;
decay of the, 114

Mohamed Ali, 37, 71, 72, 101,
139

Mohamed Burgash, 152

Mohammed, 7, 8, 9, 13; the
Conqueror, 21, 22

Mohammedan agitation in India,
60

Mohammedan Bolshevist Con-
yress, 187, 192

Mohammedan conquerors, 115

Mohammedan movement, 139

Mohammedan religion, 57, 152,
194; orthodoxy, 11; Sacred
Law, 160, 209; Shiah, state,
193; see Shiahs, Sunnis

Mohammedan states _—under
Russia, 199

Mohammedan world, 57, 61

Mohammedanism, 6, 20, 208;
see Islam

Mohammedans, 25, 26, 45, 493
conservatism of, 164; French,
51; hostile to French mandate,
176; Indian, 51, 57, 124, 130,
139, 140; massacred, 202;
orthodox, 159; in Palestine,
174

Monotheism, 9, 124

Montagu, 134

Moorish architecture, 160, 162

Moors, 152; driven from Spain,
150; independence, 150 f.

Moplahs, rising of, 141, 142

Morea, 72

Morgenthau, 51

Morley, John, 132

Morocco, 7, 23, 150, 152, 144,
155, 163; arts and crafts of,
160; economic resources of,
156; under French protector-
ate, 150, 156, 164, 209; Moor-
ish population, 162; political
independence, 156; Sultans of,
1$3

Moscow, 184, 186, 199, 200,
201, 204

Mosul, 60, 168; oil in, 168

Mudania Convention, 58

Muezzin, 7

Mujtahid, 193

Mulai Hafid, 156, 157, 158

Mulai Yusef, 158

Munro, Sir Thomas, 119, 129

Mustapha Kemal, 54, 58, 61,
63, 64, 184, 185, 187, 188, 194;
first president of Turkey, 61

Mutiny of 1857, 74, 125, 129

Napoleon, 37, 71

Napoleonic wars, 35

Nationalism, 50, 77, 82, 185,
194, 208; principle of, 33, 77;
129

Nationalist movement, 78, 83,
86, 105

Navarino, 35

Near East, 54, 66, 188

Newfoundland, 30

New York, 206

Nicolas I, Czar, 38

Nile, 75; the Blue and White,
102

[ 224 |INDEX

Non-violence, 1393 I41s) see
Gandhi

North America, 29, 30, 110, 112;
French dominion in, 113

Novy Vostok, 205

Occident; 21° 495-73, 104, 131;
208% 2055 209; 211, 2125
civilization of, 12; and the
Onents 35193, 27. 335) 40; 69;
64, 67, 71, 94, 115, 164, 173,
183, 205

Oil, 168; see Mosul

Omdehs, the, go

Ommayad dynasty, 11

Orenburg, 202

Orient, 27, 33, 163; Moham-
medan, 50; resources of, 206;
trade in the, 28; see Occident

Oriental Congress, 187; at
Baku, 192, 200; bolshevism
at, 187, 192

Orkhan, 21

Othman, 20, 25; House of, 59,
62; sword of, 59

Ottoman Empire, 20, 23, 27, 28,
36, 38, 39, 40, 53, 54, 67, 84,
150, 177, 188; Arab lands in,
71, 164, 165; climax of, 25;
name of, 21; old, 65; passing
of the, 33

Ottoman sultanate, 24, 63; au-
tonomous province of, 79; ca-
pitulations surrendered, 99

Palestine, 23, 170, 172 f., 209;
see Zionist movement
Palmerston, 74

Panchayats, 38

Pan-Islamic policy, 45, 46, 48,
50, 140

“Panther,” the, 156

Pan-Turanian Empire, 65, 185

Pan-Turanian movement, 50

Paris, 17, 206; Treaty of 1856, 40

Paris Peace Conference, vii,
55, 88, 164, 171

Peace, 7, 18, 197

Persiay £2511 9>929503175) 508 1078
190, 193, 199; bolshevism in,
188; republic, 194

Persian finance, Igo

Persian reformers, 189

Pitt, 118; Government of India
Act, 118

Plassey, battle of, 113, 117

Poland, 23, 26, 35

Political ascendancy, 207

Political exiles, 199; see Russia

Portuguese, 28, 29, 33; in India,
109

Powers, the, 42; see Allies

Protectorate, British, 78, 85, 89,
93, 98, 149, 150; French, 150,
156 f., 161; Russian, 38

Protectorates, 149, 210

Prussia, 35

Punjab, 137

Quebec, battle of, 113

Racial feeling, 129, 160, 173, 211

Railway, Caspian, 199; Hejaz,
48; Siberian, 199

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 30

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Reds, 201, 202

Reform Bill of 1832, 119

Religion, 6, 49, 71, 128; Moham-
medan, 194; wars of, 19; see
Christianity

Religious customs, III

Religious discord, 173

Religious fanaticism, 65

Renaissance, 18

Riff tribesmen, 157

Rights, hereditary, 72, 149; of
minorities, 61

Ripon, Lord, 129

Riza Khan, 194

Robert College, at Constan-
tinople, 170

Roman Empire, 71

Romans, 28

Rome, 22

Rumania, 36

Russia, 34, 35, 36, 38, 49, 41, 46,
65, 140, 183, 190; in Asia, 195;
bolshevist, 197; czarist, 187;
Imperial, 198; influence in
Persia, 189; political exiles
from, 199; Soviet, 66, 1865,
186, 187, 193, 197, 199, 201

Russian anarchism, 131, 184

Russian Church, 184

Russian government in Asia, 200

Russian protectorate, 38

Russian Revolution, 196, 199

Russo-Turkish War, 43

St. Sophia, 22
Salisbury, Lord, 46

Salonica, 49

“Samarkand, Golden Road to,”
14

Samuel, Sir Herbert, 174

Sanders, Limon von, 63

San Remo Conference, 176

Science, 15, 16, 138

Scot, Michael, 18

Self-determination, 86, 101, 185,
186, 197, 199, 207

Self-government, 119; local, in
Egypt, 83, 90, 94; in India,
11g (see Swaraj); in Iraq, 167

Selim the Grim, 24, 42, 71

Seljukide Empire, 20

Seraglio, 26, 43

Serbia, 36

Serbs, 20; rebellion of, 35

Seville, 16, 151

Shiahs, 11, 13, 168, 193

Shiekh-ul-Islam, 62

Shiva, 131

Shuster, 190

Siberia, 198

“Sick man,’ 27

Slave trade, 118, 153

Smyrna, 53, 58

Sobiesky, John, 26

Soliman the Magnificent, 25, 43

Soviet delegates, 187; see Russia

Soviet republics, 192, 201, 202

Spain 125) 175, Jihis) arabs
driven out of, 18, 150; con-
quest of, 15, 151; dominions

of, 33

{ 226 |}INDEX

Spaniards, 28, 29

Spiritual power, 10, 24, 43, 44,
$9, 121, 159; and temporal, 10

Stalin, 200

Stamboul, 44

Strikes, political, 88

Sublime Porte, 44

Sudan, the, 75, 98, 101; recon-
quest of, 102

Suez, 74

Suez Canal, 51, 74

Sultanate, 58, 188; Ottoman, 63

Sulva Bay, 63

Sunni Mohammedans, 193

Sunnis, II, 13

Supremacy, racial, 59

Surat, III

Swara], 134, 136, 138

Swarajists, 204

Syria, vii, 23, 51, 55, 88, 170, 176,
176, 209 e

Syrians, 45, 171

Talaat, 52, 171

Tangier, 152 f., 167
Tashkend, 200, 201, 202
Tatars, 192, 203

Teheran, 189, 190, 191, 194
Tel-el-Kebir, battle of, 77
Tewfik, Khedive, 77
Theocracy, 10, 59; Islamic, 44
Thrace, 53, 58, 60

Tusit, 37

Toledo, 16

Trade unions, 204

Trade, Western, 73, 206
Traders, Dutch, 112
Transcaucasus, 186
Translations, 14, 15, 18

Treaty: of alliance between
Egypt and Great Britain, 94;
bilateral, 167; of Lausanne,
59, 66, 99, 186; of Paris in
1856, 40; Persian with Britain,
191; of San Stefano, 42; of
Sévres, 53, 60; of Ungkiar
Skelessi, 38; of Versailles,
54, 99, 172

Treaties, of alliance, 116, 201;
international, 78; of subordi-
nate alliance, 149

Tripoli, 23, 50, 209; Italian
invasion of, 140

Tsargrad, 37

Tunis, 23; protectorate over,
150, 209

Turkestan, soviet republic of, 201

Turkey, 23, 26, 35, 42, 46, 47>
54, 65, 77, 85, 184, 191, 198;
banished from Europe, 53;
capitulations surrendered to,
99; claimed Mosul, 168, 170;
defense of, 40; European, 34,
35, 36, 41; hardships of, 65;
lost Arab provinces, 60; new,
66; population of, 65; resur-
gence of, 140; revolt of Mecca,
I4I, 166; terms of peace, 55;
war with Western powers, 185

Turkish conquest, 23; of Egypt,
29

Turkish Empire, 38, 51, 56; rule
of, revised, 60; savagery in, 52;
sultans, of,152; traditions of,5g

[ 227 ]

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THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

Turkish Republic, 11, 63, 186;
declared, 61

Turkish Revolution of 1908-1909,
49

Turks, 5, 19, 23, 25, 30, 535 575
60, 187; atrocities of, 52; see
Young Turks

Ulema, 91

Union and Progress Committee,
49, 171

United States, vii, 118, 172,
178, 205; see America

University at Beirut, 170

University of Calcutta, 126

University of El Azhar, 91, 104

University of Fez, 152, 163

University of London, 126

University of Padua, 17

Vedas, 120

Venice, 28

Vernacular newspapers, 200, 206
Vespucci, Amerigo, 28

Victoria, Queen, 126

Vienna, 23, 26

Wahabis, 72

Wales, Prince of, in India, 143

War of Independence, American,
117

West African colonies, of France,
154

West Indies, 29

Whitehall, Indians at, 145

Wilberforce, 118

William II, of Germany, 46, 48,
50

Wilson, President, 86, 164, 171,
207

World-dominion, 46

Yeldiz Kiosk, 44, 45, 46, 47
Young Turks, 50, §1, 72, 139

Zaghlul Pasha, Saad, 82, 83, 84,
86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95, 99» 103

Zanzibar, under British pro-
tectorate, 150

Zinovieff, Comrade, 187, 188
Zionist movement, 173, 175, 176
Zionists, 173, 174

 

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

{ 228 |The Following Volumes Are Published
Under the Norman Wait Harris
Memorial Foundation

= 1 ee

The Occident and the Orient
By Sir Valentine Chirol

A clear and connected story of the interrelationships, both past
and present, of East and West as they affect Western civilization
today. Through his former position as director of the foreign de-
partment of the London Times, Sir Valentine Chirol has had a re-
markable opportunity to study the changing relations of the East
and West.

Germany in Transition
By Herbert Kraus

What do the German people think about the Versailles Treaty?
about guilt for the war? about the League of Nations? This book
describes Germany in transition from war and revolution, a subject of
world-wide importance. Dr. Kraus gives a skilful analysis of German
problems that cannot fail to help one understand present-day
Germany.

The Stabilization of Europe
By Charles de Visscher

A logical treatment of the problems of nationality, security, and
international communications, problems that are most vital to the
moral, political, and economic rehabilitation of Europe. Charles de
Visscher brings to this book a wide knowledge of international
problems. Each $2.00, postpaid $2.10

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The 1925 lectures, dealing with problems of the Far East, will be pub-
lished in the fall of 1925. The lecturers—Count Soyeshima, of the House of
Peers of Japan; President Kuo, of Southeastern University, Nanking, China;
Mr. W. G. W. Woodhead, editor of the Peking and Tientsin Times; Mr.
Julean Arnold, of the United States Consulate; and Mr. H. K. Norton,
publicist—are all familiar with present-day international questions in Japan,
China, and Russia and their addresses are important aids to the better
understanding of world-problems.

 

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, II.

 

 

 

 

 

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