CHAPTER XI

THE YOUNG TURK _RÉGIME_ IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

No event during the first decade of the twentieth century was heralded throughout Europe with so great and so sincere interest and sympathy as the bloodless revolution of July 24, 1908, by which the _régime_ of Abdul Hamid was overthrown and the constitution of 1876 resuscitated.

Although the world was unprepared for this event, it was not due to any sudden cause. For twenty years the leaven of liberalism had been working in the minds of the educated classes in the Ottoman Empire. Moslems, as well as Christians, had been in attendance in large numbers at the American, French, Italian, and German schools in Turkey, and had gone abroad to complete their education. Just as in Italy and in Germany, Young Turkey had come into existence through contact with those free institutions in the outside world which other races enjoyed, had been emancipated from superstition and from the stultifying influences of religious formalism, and had grown, in the army, to numbers sufficient to dictate the policy of the Government.

From the beginning of his reign, Abdul Hamid had {181} done all in his power to prevent the growth of the liberal spirit. The result of thirty years, in so far as civil officials of the Government were concerned, had been the stamping out of every man who combined ability with patriotism and devotion to an ideal. The best elements had taken the road to death, to imprisonment, or to exile, so that from the palace down to the humblest village, the Turkish civil service was composed of a set of men absolutely lacking in independence and in honour, and devoted to the master who ruled from Yildiz. But in the army, this same policy, though attempted, had not wholly succeeded. A portion at least of the officers received an education; many of them, indeed, had been sent abroad to Germany and to France in order to keep abreast with the development of military science, so essential to the very existence of Turkey. In the army, then, hundreds of officers of high character and high ideals were able to avoid the fate which had come to other educated Moslems in Turkey. They learned to love their country, and with that love came a sense of shame for the results of the despotism under which they existed. To have lived in Paris or in Berlin was enough to make them dissatisfied; to have visited Cairo or Alexandria, Sofia or Bukarest or Athens, and to have contrasted the conditions of life in these cities, recently their own, with Constantinople, Salonika, and Smyrna, was sufficient.

It is impossible in the limits of this book to tell how this bloodless revolution was planned by exiles abroad and officers at home. It was successful, as {182} well as bloodless, because the army refused to obey the orders of the Sultan. To save his life and his throne, Abdul Hamid was compelled to resuscitate the constitution which he had granted, and then suppressed, at the beginning of his reign.

We who lived through those dream days of the beginning of the new _régime_ will never forget the sense of joy of an emancipated people. The spy system was abolished, newspapers were allowed to tell the truth and express their own opinions, passports and _teskeres_ (permissions to travel from one point to another within the Empire) were declared unnecessary, _bakshish_ was refused at the custom house and police station. Moslem _ulema_ and Christian clergy embraced each other in public, rode through the streets in triumph in the same carriages, and harangued the multitudes from the same platform in mosque and church. A new era of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, they said, had dawned for all the races in Turkey. The Sultan was the father, Turkey the fatherland, barriers and disabilities of creed and race had ceased to exist. It seemed incredible, but these scenes were really happening from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.

Optimism, hope for the future, was so strong that one had not the heart to express very loudly his belief that no real revolution was ever bloodless, that no real change in political and social life of the people could come in a single day or as a result of an official document. No one could think of anything else but the constitution, which had broken the chains for Moslem and Christian alike, the constitution which {183} was going to restore Turkey to its lawful place among the nations of Europe, the constitution which was to heal the sick man and solve the question of the Orient. In Smyrna, in Constantinople, in Beirut, and in Asia Minor, I heard the same story over and over again. But there was always the misgiving, the apprehension for the future, from which the foreigner in Turkey is never free. It seemed too good to be true; it _was_ too good to be true. It was against the logic of history. The most wonderful constitution that the world has ever known is that of England. It does not exist on paper; there is no need for a document. It is good, and it has endured, because it has been written in blood, in suffering, and in the agony of generations, on the pages of eight centuries of history. Could Turkey hope to be free in a day?

The first test of the constitution came, of course, with the election and composition of the Parliament. The election was held quietly, in some parts of the Empire secretly even, and when the Parliament assembled at Constantinople, one began to see already the handwriting on the wall. For its composition was in no way in accordance with the distribution of population in the Empire. The Turk--and by the Turk I mean the composite Moslem race which has grown up through centuries of inter-marriage and forcible conversion--had always been the ruling race. With the establishment of a constitutional _régime_, the Young Turks did not mean to abdicate in favour of Moslem Arabs or Christian Greeks and Armenians. They had "arranged" the elections in such a way that they would have in the {184} Parliament a substantial majority over any possible combination of other racial elements.

One cannot but have sympathy with the natural feeling of racial pride which is inborn in the Turks. A race of masters,--who could expect that they would be willing to surrender the privileges of centuries? But they forgot that a constitutional _régime_ and the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity must necessarily imply the yielding of their unique position in the Empire. The Turk, as a race, is composed of two elements, a ruling class of land-owners and military and civil officials, arrogant though courteous, corrupt though honest in private life, parasitical though self-respecting, and a peasant class, hopelessly ignorant, lacking in energy, initiative, ambition, aspirations, and ideals. The great bulk of the Turkish element in the Empire looked with the indifference of ignorance and the hostility of jealous regard for their unique position in the community upon the granting of a constitution. I doubt if five per cent. of the Turkish population of the Empire has ever known what a constitutional _régime_ means, or cared whether it exists or not.

There remains the five per cent. Of these the great bulk belong either to the corrupt official class, whose subjection to the tyranny of Yildiz Kiosk had totally unfitted them for service under the new _régime_ on which they were entering, and the land-owners, whose wealth was dependent upon the unequal privileges that the law allowed to them as Moslems, and whose interests were totally at variance with the spirit of the constitution. There are {185} left small groups of younger army officers and of professional men, who had been educated in foreign schools or by foreign teachers in Turkey and abroad. They were, for the most part, either without the knowledge of any other _métier_ than the army, or, if civilian, unfitted by training and experience for governmental executive and administrative work. Consequently from the very beginning, the genuine Young Turks who were honest in their idealism had to make a compact with the higher army officers and with corrupt civil officials of Abdul Hamid. When the real Young Turks controlled the Cabinet, their disasters were those of theorists and visionaries. When they yielded the control of affairs to men more experienced than they, it was simply the renewal of the tyranny of Abdul Hamid. It was because these two elements were united in the firm resolution to keep the control in the hands of Moslem Turks, that the constitutional _régime_ in Turkey has gone from Scylla to Charybdis without ever entering port.

From the very beginning, thoughtful men pointed out that there was only one way of salvation and of liberal evolution for the Ottoman Empire. That was an honest and sincere co-operation with the Christian elements of the Empire, and with the Arabic and Albanian Moslem elements. Fanaticism and racial pride prevented the Young Turks from adopting the sole possible way of establishing the constitutional _régime_. From the very beginning, then, they failed, and it is their failure which has plunged Europe into the series of wars that has ended in the devastation of unhappy Belgium, so far remote from the cause and {186} so innocent of any part in the events which brought upon her such terrible misfortunes. One could write a whole book upon the events of the first five years of constitutional government in Turkey and could show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how from the very beginning there was no honest and loyal effort made to apply even the most rudimentary principles of constitutional government. Despotism means the subjection of a country to the will of its rulers. Constitutionalism means the subjection of the rulers to the will of the country. The Young Turks, embodied in the "Committee of Union and Progress," merely continued the despotism of Abdul Hamid. They were far worse than Abdul Hamid, however, for they were irresponsible and unskilled. One handling the helm, knowing how to steer, might have kept the ship of state afloat, all the more easily, perhaps, because the waters were so troubled. Many hands, none knowing where or how to go, steered the Ottoman Empire to inevitable shipwreck.

Although the vicissitudes of various Cabinets and Parliaments can have place in our work only so far as they have a direct bearing on foreign relations, there are six matters of internal policy which must be mentioned in order to explain how rapidly and surely the Ottoman Empire went to its destruction; the treatment of Armenians before and after the Adana massacres; the attempt to suppress the liberties of the Orthodox Church; the Cretan question, ending in the Greek boycott; the Macedonian policy; the Albanian uprisings; and the lack of co-operation and sympathy with the Arabs.

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THE ARMENIANS AND THE ADANA MASSACRES

Among the various races of the Ottoman Empire, none was more overcome with joy at the proclamation of the constitutional _régime_ than the Armenian. Scattered everywhere throughout the Empire, and in no region an element of preponderance, the Armenians had always made themselves felt in the commercial and intellectual life of Turkey far out of proportion to their numerical strength. They appreciated and understood, best of all the Christian populations, the significance of constitutional government. Honestly applied, it meant more to them than to any other element of the Empire.

In the first place, the burden of Turkish and Moslem oppression had fallen most heavily on them. It was not only the massacres of 1894 to 1896, horrible as they were, which had put the Armenians in continual fear for their lives; it was the centuries-old petty persecution, from which they believed they were now to be freed. Turkish officialdom had grown rich in extorting the last farthing from the Armenians. Only those who had seen this persecution and extortion can realize how large a part it played in the daily life of the Armenians, and how continuous and rich a source of revenue it was to the official Turk. For every little service the official expected his fat fee, always charging up to the limit his victim was able to pay. You could not carry on your business, you could not build a house, you could not enlarge or alter or repair your shop, you could not get a tax on your harvest estimated, you could {188} not travel even from one village to another for the purpose of business or pleasure or study, without paying the officials. Very frequently between the local Turkish official and the Armenian stood a middle man who must also be paid for the purpose of carrying the fee or bribe to the official in charge. How people could have lived under such a _régime_ and have prospered, is beyond the comprehension of the Occidental. Nothing speaks so eloquently for the business acumen of the Armenian race, as well as for devotion to the religion of its fathers.

Naturally, the Armenians expected that the constitution would bring to them a complete relief from economic repression, as well as from the terrors of massacre. They were led to believe this by the Young Turks who had so long plotted the overthrow of Abdul Hamid's despotism. During the campaign from 1890-1908, the Young Turks needed the money and the brains of Armenians in the larger centres of population where they had their _foyers_, and in the cities abroad where they lived in exile. It cannot be doubted that there were among the Young Turks during the period when they had to keep alive their ideals in the fire of hope, an honest intention to give the Armenians a share in the regeneration of the Ottoman Empire. But, as soon as they realized their ambitions, racial and religious fanaticism came to them with such force that they forgot the brilliant promises as well as the affectionate intercourse of the days of suffering and struggle.

In the second place, Armenians, unlike the Greeks, the Macedonians, and the Arabs, had, as a race, no {189} separatist tendencies. They were not looking towards another state to come and redeem them. They feared Russia. They were too scattered to hope to form, by the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, a state of their own. They loved the land in which they lived with all the passion of their nature. In many regions, Turkish was their native tongue. They were industrious tillers of the soil, as well as merchants. The Sultan could have had no more loyal subjects than these, had he so desired.

Although the composition of the new Parliament chosen in October, 1908, and of the first constitutional Cabinet, was a prophecy of how they were to be left out in the cold, the Armenians were throughout that winter, when the constitution was new, firm and loyal, as well as intelligent, supporters of regenerated Turkey. The wish was father to the thought. For them there was no longer the barrier of race and creed. All were Osmanlis, and willing to lose their identity in the politically amalgamated race. The reign of Abdul Hamid was a nightmare, quickly forgotten. The future was full of hope. If only the Young Turks had realized what a tremendous influence the Armenians could have played in the creation of New Turkey, if only they had been willing to use these allies, we might have been able to write a different history of the past few years in Europe.

But the awakening was to be cruel. It came in a region of the Empire that never before experienced the horrors of a general massacre, where Christians felt not only at ease, but on friendly terms with their Moslem neighbours.

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On April 14, 1909, on a morning when the sun had risen upon the peaceful and happy city of Adana, out of a clear sky came the tragedy which was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Without provocation, the Moslem population began to attack and kill the Christians. The Governor of the province and his military officials not only did nothing whatever to stop the bloodshed, but they actually handed out arms and munitions to the blood-frenzied mob of peasants, who were pouring into the city. For three days, killing, looting, and burning of houses were aided by the authorities. The massacres spread west through the great Cilician plain to Tarsus, and east over the Amanus Range into northern Syria, as far as Antioch, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. The world, horrified by the stories which soon made their way to the newspapers, realized that the "bloodless revolution" had not regenerated Turkey. The blood had come at last, and without the regeneration! The Great Powers sent their warships to Mersina, the port of Tarsus and Adana. Even from the distant United States came two cruisers, under pressure, over six thousand miles.

In the meantime, events of great importance, but not of equal significance in the future of Turkey, were taking place at Constantinople. On the eve of the first Adana massacre, Abdul Hamid, having corrupted the soldiers of the Constantinople garrison, set in motion a demonstration against the constitution. The soldiers shot down their officers in cold blood, marched to Yildiz Kiosk, and demanded of the {191} Sultan the abolition of the constitution, which they declared was at variance with the _Sheriat_, the sacred law of Islam. Abdul Hamid gladly consented. Popular sympathy in Constantinople and throughout the Empire was with the Sultan, as far as the object of the revolution went. But the way in which it was brought about made it impossible for the Sultan to remain within the pale of civilization. Of all nations, none relied on its army more than Turkey. Were the assassination of the officers to go unpunished, the disintegration of the Empire necessarily followed. So the military hierarchy, "Old" Turks as well as "Young," rose against the Sultan. The army corps in Salonika under the command of Mahmud Shevket pasha, marched against the capital and with very little resistance mastered the mutiny of the Constantinople garrison. Abdul Hamid was deposed, and sent into exile at the Villa Alatini at Salonika. His brother, Reshid Mohammed, came to the throne, under the title of Mohammed V.

As soon as the Young Turks found themselves again in control of the situation, even before the proclamation of the new Sultan, they sent from Beirut to Adana a division of infantry to "re-establish order." These regiments disembarked at Mersina on the day Mohammed V ascended the throne, April 25th. Immediately upon their arrival in Adana they began a second massacre which was more horrible than the first. Thousands were shot and burned, and more than half the city was in ruins. This second massacre occurred in spite of the fact {192} that a dozen foreign warships were by this time anchored in the harbour of Mersina.

It is impossible to estimate the losses of life and property in the _vilayets_ of Cilicia and northern Syria during the last two weeks of April, 1908. Not less than thirty thousand Armenians were massacred. The losses of property in Adana alone were serious enough to cause the foremost fire insurance company in France to fight in the courts for two years the payments of its claims. But it is not in the realm of our work to follow out the local aftermath of this terrible story. We are interested here only in its bearing on the fortunes of the Empire and of Europe.

From the very beginning, the Young Turks, now re-established in Constantinople with a Sultan of their own creation, and having nothing more to fear from the genius and bad will of Abdul Hamid, protested before Europe that the massacres were due to the old _régime_ and that they had been arranged by Abdul Hamid, whose deposition cleared them of responsibility. But the revelations of the _New York Herald_, the _Tribuna_ of Rome, and the _Berliner Tageblatt_, translated and reprinted in the British, French, and Russian press, were so moving that it was necessary for the Young Turks to send special commissions to the capitals of Europe to counteract the impression of these articles.

Europe was willing to accept the explanation of the Constantinople Cabinet, and to continue its faith, though shaken, in the intentions of the Young Turks to grant to the Christians of Turkey the _régime_ of equality and security of life and property {193} which the constitution guaranteed. Even the Armenians, terrible as this blow had been, were also willing to forgive and forget. But the condition of forgiveness, and the proof of sincerity of the declarations of the Young Turks, both to the outside world and to the Armenians, would be the punishment of those who had been guilty of this most horrible blot upon the civilization of the twentieth century. This was to be the test.

The Court-Martial, sent to Adana from Constantinople after the new Sultan was established upon the throne and the Young Turks were certain of their position, had every guarantee to enable it to do its work thoroughly and justly. It was not influenced or threatened. There was, however, no honest intention to give decisions impartially and in accordance with the facts that the investigation would bring forth. The methods and findings of the Court-Martial were a travesty of justice. Its members refused absolutely to go to the bottom of the massacre, and to punish those who had been guilty. I happen to be the only foreign witness whose deposition they took. They refused to allow me to testify against the Vali and his fellow-conspirators. The line of conduct had been decided before their arrival. The idea was to condemn to death a few Moslems of the dregs of the population, who would probably have found their way to the gallows sooner or later any way. With them were to be hanged a number of Armenians, whose only crime was that they had defended the lives and honour of their women and children. The Vali of Adana, who had planned the {194} massacre and had carried it out, and two or three Moslem leaders of the city who had co-operated with him and with the military authorities in the effort to exterminate the Armenians, were not even sent to prison. No testimony against them was allowed to be brought before the Court-Martial. They went into exile "until the affair blew over."

When a future generation has the prospective to make researches into the downfall of the Young Turk constitutional _régime_ in Turkey, they will probably find the beginning of the end in the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Adana massacres. For this was a formal notification to the Christians of Turkey that the constitutional _régime_ brought to them no guarantees of security, or justice, but, on the other hand, made their position in the Empire even more precarious than it had been under the despotism of Abdul Hamid. After Adana, the Armenian population became definitely alienated from the constitutional movement, and was convinced that its only hope lay in the absolute disappearance of Turkish rule.

THE ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS THE LIBERTIES OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

When Mohammed the Conqueror entered Constantinople in 1453, he showed a wise determination to continue the policy of his predecessors by preserving the independence of the Orthodox Church. For he knew well that the success of the Osmanlis had been due to religious toleration, and that no durable empire could be built in Asia Minor and the Balkan {195} Peninsula by a Moslem government, unless the liberties of the Christian inhabitants were assured through the recognition of the Greek patriarchate. The first thing that Mohammed did was to seek out the Greek patriarch, and confirm him in his position as the political, as well as the religious, head of Christian Ottoman subjects.

Islam is a theocracy. The spirit of its government is inspired by the sacred law, the _Sheriat_, based upon the Koran and the writings of the earliest fathers of Islam. Down to the smallest details, the organization of the state, of the courts of justice, and of the social life of Mohammedan peoples, is influenced by ecclesiastical law, and by the power of the Church. As this law does not provide for the inclusion of non-Moslem elements either in the political or social life of the nation, it has always been evident that people of another religion, within the limits of a Moslem state, can exist only if they have an ecclesiastical organization of their own, with well-defined liberties, privileges, and safeguards.

This principle was recognized by the Osmanlis for over five hundred years; even the most despotic of sultans never dreamed of abandoning it. There might be persecutions, there might be massacres, there might be even assassination of patriarchs, but, until the Young Turk _régime_, no Ottoman ministry ever dreamed of destroying the organism which had made possible the life of Moslem and Christian under the same rule.

The thesis of the Young Turks was, from a theoretical standpoint, perfectly sound and just. They {196} said that ecclesiastical autonomy was necessary under a despotism, but that it had ceased to have a _raison d'être_ under a constitutional government. The constitution guaranteed equal rights, irrespective of religion, to all the races of the Empire. Therefore the Greek Church must resign its prerogatives of a political nature, for they were wholly incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.

Many foreigners, carried away by the reasonableness of this argument, severely condemned the Orthodox Church for continuing to resist the encroachments of the new Government upon its secular privileges--secular in both senses of the word. They attributed the attitude of the Greek ecclesiastics to hostility to the constitution, to the reactionary tendency of every ecclesiastic organization, and to selfish desire to hold firmly the privileges which enabled them to keep in their clutches the Greek population of Turkey, and continue to enjoy the prestige and wealth accruing to them from these privileges. Such criticism only revealed ignorance of history and a lack of appreciation of the real issue at stake.

No ecclesiastical organization can, under a constitutional government, continue indefinitely to be a state within a state, and to enjoy peculiar privileges and immunities. But the application of the constitution must come first. It must enter into the life of the people. It must become the vital expression of their national existence, evolved through generations of testing and experimenting. The constitution is finally accepted and supported by a nation {197} when, and because, it has been found good and has come to reflect the needs and wishes of the people. Then, without any great trouble, the ecclesiastical organization will find itself gradually deprived of every special privilege. For the privileges will have become an anachronism.

But, just as in the establishment of the constitution, in their attitude toward the Greek Church the Young Turks acted as if the work of generations in other countries could be for them, in spite of their peculiarly delicate problems and the differences in creed involved, the act of a single moment. This mentality of the half-educated, immature visionary has been shown in every one of the numerous senseless and disastrous decisions which have brought the Ottoman Empire so speedily to its ruin.

The Greek Church resisted bitterly every move of the Young Turks to bring about the immediate millennium. The patriarch was a man of wide experience, of sound common sense, and of undaunted courage. Backed by the Lay Assembly, which has always been an admirable democratic institution of the Orthodox Church, he refused to give up realities for chimeras. With all its privileges and all its power, it had been hard enough for the Orthodox Church to protect the Greek subjects of Turkey. The patriarch did not intend to surrender the safeguards by which he was enabled to make tolerable the life of his flock for illusory and untested guarantees. Let the constitution become really the expression of the will of the people of Turkey, let it demonstrate the uselessness of any safeguards for {198} protecting the Christians from Moslem oppression, let the era of liberty and equality and fraternity actually be realized in the Ottoman Empire, and then the Church would resign its privileges. For they would be antiquated, and fall naturally into desuetude. But in constitutions, as in other things, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

What the Young Turks attempted to do was to destroy the privileges of the Orthodox Church, on the ground that these privileges were a barrier to the assimilation of the races in the Empire. Americans, above all nations, have deep sympathies for, and well justified reasons for having faith in, the policy of assimilation. Have not the various races of Europe, different in religion and in political and social customs, passed wonderfully through the crucible of assimilation on American soil? But by assimilation the Young Turks meant, not the amalgamation of races, each co-operating and sharing in the building up of the fatherland, as in America, but the complete subjection and ultimate disappearance of all other elements in the Empire than their own. They intended, from the very first days of the constitutional _régime_, to make Turkey a nation of Turks. Theirs was the strong, virile race, into which the other races would be fused. Turkey was weak, they declared, because it was the home of a conglomeration of peoples. If Turkey was to become like the nations of Europe, these different nationalities must be destroyed. To destroy them, the Government had first to aim at the _foyer_ of national life, the ecclesiastical hierarchies.

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I have talked with many a zealous Young Turk. What I have written here is not only the logical interpretation of the facts; it is also the faithful expression of the ideas of the most earnest and intelligent Turkish partisans of the new _régime_. They pointed out, with perfect logic, that this process had gone on in every European country, and that it was the only way in which a strong nation could be built. So far they were right. But, aside from the fact that in Europe this political and social evolution had taken centuries, there was also the working of the law of the survival of the fittest. In European nations it had been the element, always composite, which deserved to live, that formed the nucleus of a nationality. The whole root of the question in Turkey was, were the Young Turks justified in believing that the Turk was this element?

There is not space to discuss the reasons for the supremacy of the Osmanli in the Ottoman Empire. Up to the eighteenth century, the Osmanli was undoubtedly the "fittest" element. For the past two hundred years, the continued domination of Turk and the continued subjection of Christian populations, in Turkey, has been due to causes outside of the Empire. The Turk has remained the ruling race. But is he still the fittest? One may examine the different elements of the Ottoman Empire, and measure them by the tests of civilization. From the intellectual standpoint, from the business standpoint, from the administrative standpoint, the Turk is hardly able to sustain his claim to continue to be, in a twentieth-century empire, the element which can {200} hope to assimilate Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Slav, and Arab. He is less fit than any of the others, especially than the Greek and Armenian in intellectual and business faculties, and than the Albanian in administrative faculties. There remains, then, as his sole claim to dominate the other races, his physical superiority. By history and by legend, he is the fighting man and rules by right of conquest and force.

It was always the sane--and only safe--policy of the Turks to keep Christians out of the army. They saw to it that the _métier_ of arms remained wholly to the Moslems. In spite of the increasing wealth and education of the Christian elements of the Empire, the ascendancy was preserved to the Turk through the army. But at what a sacrifice! By reason of military service, the Turkish peasant has been kept in economic and intellectual serfdom, while his Christian neighbour progressed. The Turkish population has actually decreased, and the ravages of garrison life, due to dyspepsia and syphilis, have diminished fearfully the physical vigour of the race. By the same token, the upper classes, knowing only the life of army officers, have been removed from the necessity of competing in the world for position and success. Can manhood be formed in any other mould than that of competition, where the goal is achievement, and is reached only by continued effort of will and brain? The upper class Turk is a parasite, and, like all parasites, helpless when that upon which he feeds is taken from him.

[Illustration: Map--Europe in 1911]

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The attack of the Young Turk party upon the Greek Church failed. The patriarch refused to surrender his privileges. The Greek clergy and the Lay Council held out under persecution and threats. In October, 1910, when the Lay Council met in Constantinople, its members were arrested, and thrown into jail. In Macedonia and Thrace, in the Ægean Islands, along the coast of Asia Minor, the bishops and clergy suffered untold persecutions. Some were even assassinated. I shall never forget a memorable interview I had with Joachim III, during that crisis. His Holiness untied with trembling fingers the _dossier_ of persecutions, which contained letters and sworn statements from a dozen dioceses. "They treat us like dogs!" he cried. "Never under Abdul Hamid or any Sultan have my people suffered as they are suffering now. But we are too strong for them. We refuse to be exterminated. I see all Europe stained with blood because of these crimes." How prophetic these words as I record them now!

The Turk could not hope to assimilate the Greek by peaceful methods, because he was his intellectual inferior. When he planned to use force, the Balkan Alliance was formed. The battle of Lulé Burgas took away from the Turk his last claim to fitness as dominant race. He could no longer fight better than Christians. The first Balkan War gave the _coup de grâce_ to the final--and has it not been all along the only?--argument for Turkish racial supremacy.

THE CRETAN QUESTION AND THE GREEK BOYCOTT

The island of Crete had long been to Turkey, in relation to Greece, what Cuba had been to Spain, in {202} relation to the United States. In both cases, and about the same time, wars of liberation broke out. But Greece was not as fortunate in her efforts for the emancipation of an enslaved and continually rebellious population as was the United States. Powerless and humiliated, after the war of 1897, Greece could no longer hope to have a voice, by reason of her own force, in the direction of Cretan affairs. Crete became the foundling of European diplomacy.

Together with the declaration of Bulgarian independence, and the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, the Young Turks had to face a decree of the Cretan assembly to the effect that Crete was indissolubly united to the kingdom of Greece. The Young Turks could do nothing against Bulgaria. For the ceremony of Tirnovo had been no more than the _de jure_ sanction of a _de facto_ condition. The only cause for conflict, the question of the railroads in eastern Rumelia, was solved by Russian diplomacy. Against Austria-Hungary a boycott was declared. It resulted in a few successful attempts to prevent the landing of mails and freights from Austrian steamers, and in the tearing up of several million fezes which were of Austrian manufacture. These, by the way, were soon replaced by new fezes from the same factories. The Sublime Porte settled the Bosnia-Herzegovina question by accepting a money payment from Austria-Hungary.

All the rancour resulting from these losses and humiliation, all the vials of wrath, were poured upon the head of Greece. The Cretan question became {203} the foremost problem in European diplomacy. The Cretans stubbornly refused to listen to the Powers, and decided to maintain their decision to belong to Greece. But Greece was threatened with war by Turkey, if she did not refuse to accept the annexation decree voted by the Cretans themselves. In order to prevent Turkey from attacking Greece, the Powers decided to use force against the Cretans. Turkey, not satisfied with the efforts of the Powers to preserve the Ottoman sovereignty and Ottoman pride in Crete, demanded still more of Greece. She asked that the Greek Parliament should not only declare its disinterestedness in Crete, but should take upon itself the obligation to maintain that disinterestedness in the future.

To go into all the tortuous phases of the Cretan question up to the time of the Balkan War would make this chapter out of proportion; and yet Crete, like Alsace-Lorraine, has had a most vital influence upon the present European war. The one point to be emphasized here is, that to bring pressure to bear upon Greece in defining her attitude toward Crete, the Young Turks decided to revive the commercial boycott which they had used against Austria. I have seen from close range the notorious Greek boycott of 1910 to 1912. It was far more disastrous to the Turks than to the Greeks of Turkey. It threatened so completely, however, the economic prosperity of Greece, which is a commercial rather than an agricultural country, that it forced Greece into the Balkan Alliance much against her will, for the sake of self-preservation.

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If this boycott had been carried on against the Greeks of Greece alone, it would not have affected vitally the prosperity of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Their imports come from every country, and for their exports the freight steamers of all the European nations competed. But it was directed also against the Greeks who were Ottoman subjects. In Salonika, Constantinople, Trebizond, Smyrna, and other ports, commerce was entirely in the hands of Greeks. They owned almost every steamer bearing the Ottoman flag. They owned the cargoes. They bought and sold the merchandise. The Young Turks, working through the _hamals_ or longshoremen and the boatmen who manned the lighters,--all Turks and Kurds,--succeeded in tying up absolutely the commerce of Ottoman Greeks. The Greek merchants and shippers were ruined. It was urged cleverly that this was the chance for Moslems to get the trade of the great ports of Turkey into their own hands. The Government encouraged them by buying and maintaining steamship lines. But the Turks had no knowledge of commerce, no money to buy goods, and no inclination to do the work and accept the responsibilities necessary for successful commercial undertakings. The result was that imports were stopped, prices went up, and the Moslems were hurt as much as, if not more than, the Christians. After several voyages, the new government passenger vessels were practically _hors de combat_. There was no longer first, second, and third class. Peasants squatted on the decks and in the saloons. Filth reigned supreme, and hopeless confusion. No {205} European could endure a voyage on one of these steamers, and no merchant cared to entrust his shipments to them.

The boycott died because it was a hopeless undertaking. For many months, the Government lost heavily through the falling off in the custom house receipts. The labouring class (almost wholly Moslems) of the seaports suffered terribly, as our labouring class suffers during a prolonged strike. The boycott was removed, Greeks were allowed to resume their business, so essential for the prosperity of the community, and, as is always the case in Turkey, everything worked again in the same old way.

But, just as the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Adana massacre alienated definitely and irrevocably the sympathy and loyal support of the Armenian element from the constitutional _régime_, so the boycott, iniquitous and futile, lost to the Young Turks the allegiance of the Greeks of the Empire. Already alarmed by the attack upon the liberties of the patriarchate, the Greeks began to look to Greece for help; and, in the islands of the Ægean and in Macedonia, the hope was strong that a successful war might put an end to what they were suffering.

The Greeks of Turkey are not free from the universal characteristic of human nature. You can persecute and browbeat a man, you can bully him and do him physical injury, you can refuse him a share in the government and put him in an inferior social position, and he will continue to endure it. But, {206} rob him of the chance of making a livelihood, and he will commence to conspire against the government. A man's vital point is his pocket-book. That vital point the Young Turks threatened by their boycott.

THE YOUNG TURKS AND THE MACEDONIAN PROBLEM

It was at Salonika that the Young Turk movement first gained its footing in the Ottoman Empire, and until the loss of European Turkey, after the disastrous war with the Balkan States, Salonika continued to be the centre of the "Committee of Union and Progress." Its congresses were always held there. From Salonika the third army corps went forth to suppress, in April, 1909, the counter-revolution in Constantinople. To the Young Turks, Salonika seemed the safest place in all the Ottoman dominions for the imprisonment of Abdul Hamid. Many of the leading members of the party were natives of Macedonia. In fact, it was because the Young Turks saw clearly that European Turkey would soon be lost to the Empire, unless there was a regeneration, that they precipitated in 1908 the revolution which had so long been brewing.

It is natural, then, that the Macedonian problem should be the first and uppermost of all the many problems that had to be solved in the regeneration of Turkey. The "Committee of Union and Progress" saw that immediate action must be taken to strengthen Ottoman authority, so severely shaken since the war with Russia, in the European _vilayets_.

We have already shown in a previous chapter how {207} the struggle of races in European Turkey had made Macedonia the bloody centre of Balkan rivalry, and had reduced the _vilayets_ of Uskub and Salonika to anarchy.

Up to the coming of the constitutional _régime_, there had been a very strong element in Macedonia, principally Bulgarian, which saw--oh, how prophetically!--that the liberation of Macedonia from Turkish rule would endanger, rather than aid, the propaganda for eventual Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula. These Bulgarians, wise in their day and generation beyond their emancipated brethren, advocated the intervention of Bulgarian arms, not to secure independence, but autonomy. They felt that by the creation, for a period of years, of an autonomous province of Macedonia under the suzerainty of the Sultan, the felicitous history of Eastern Rumelia would repeat itself.

The Young Turks decided to solve the Macedonian problem by strengthening the Moslem element in every corner of the _vilayets_ of Salonika and Uskub. The means of doing this were at hand. After the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkish agents began to work among the Moslem population in these countries to induce them to emigrate and come under the dominion of the "Padishah," as the Sultan is called by his faithful subjects. They were brought in and settled, with the help of the Government, in those districts of Macedonia where the Moslem element was weak. This was a repetition of the policy of Abdul Hamid after the Congress of Berlin, when, in Eastern Rumelia and Thrace, {208} to oppose the Bulgarians Circassians from the lost Caucasus were settled, and to oppose the Servians Albanian emigration into old Servia and the Sandjak of Novi Bazar was encouraged.

In addition to this, the Young Turks decided to secure the loyalty of their Christian subjects in European Turkey by abolishing the _karadj_ (head tax) which exempted Christians from military service. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Servians were summoned to serve in the Ottoman army.

The first of these measures should never have been adopted. The bitter experience of former years should have taught the Young Turks the lesson that emigration of this nature not only tended to arouse religious fanaticism, but also introduced an element, ignorant and unruly, and wholly worthless from the economic point of view. It has often been recorded that Moslems, prompted to the sacrifice of abandoning everything for their love of remaining Turkish subjects, have made these "treks" after the unsuccessful wars of Turkey _of their own initiative_. Nothing is farther from the truth. There has never been an exodus of this sort which has not been due to the instigation of political agents. From the very fact that large industrious and influential Moslem elements have remained and prospered under Russian, Bulgarian, and Austrian rule, it can be inferred that those who yielded to the solicitation of Turkish agents were the undesirable Moslem element, who, never having acquired anything where they were, had nothing to lose by making a change. If one excepts a certain portion of the Circassians, the {209} statement may well be made that these emigrants--_muhadjirs_ they are called in Turkish--are an element forming the lowest dregs of the population, as worthless and shiftless as the great majority of the Jews whom the Zionist movement has attracted to Palestine. More than this, the _muhadjirs_ have been fanatical and lawless, and it is they whose massacres of Christians have invariably ended in irretrievable disaster for Turkey.

In Macedonia, the muhadjirs, in conjunction with the Albanian Moslem immigrants, were responsible for the succession of massacres in 1912, such as those of Ishtip and Kotchana, which helped to bring about the Balkan alliance. The same thing is happening to-day in the coast towns of Asia Minor and Thrace, where the brutality and blood lust of the _muhadjirs_ since 1913 will eventually cause another attack of Greece upon Turkey.

The second policy--that of enrolling Christians in the army--was recorded, back in the days of the first attempt at the emancipation of Christians, the _Tanzimat_ of 1839, as a measure which would ameliorate their lot and bring about equality. The idea was splendid, but its application was impracticable. Ottoman Christians are so wholly incompatible, from their social and educational background, with Ottoman Moslems, that they cannot be placed in the army, in mixed regiments, without incurring humiliation, degradation, and persecution of the most cruel sort.

The only way in which Christians could be called to serve in the Ottoman army would have been the formation, at first, of separate regiments, where the {210} soldiers would enjoy immunity from persecution. When this reform was made, there should have been also a provision from the very first, that the ranks of officers be recruited from the Christian elements in the Empire, in proportion to their numerical strength. But with both Christians and Jews, obligatory army service was used from the beginning--it is still used today--as a means of extorting money from those who could pay, and terrorizing and reducing to slavery those who could not raise the forty pounds required for exemption. Even if there were no religious fanaticism, even if it were not necessary for Christians of intelligence to serve in an army wholly officered by Moslems, the terrible and criminal conditions of service which they were called upon to suffer would have justified the Christians in adopting every possible measure to avoid military service.

Throughout the Empire, intelligent Christians who could not purchase their freedom from this obligation preferred exile to military service. From 1909 to 1914, Turkey has lost hundreds of thousands of its best young blood.

The result in Macedonia of the coming of the _muhadjirs_ and the taking of Christians for the army, was that the Macedonians abandoned their advocacy of autonomy, under the suzerainty of the Sultan, and looked to the Balkan States for freedom from Turkish rule.

THE ALBANIAN UPRISINGS

Albania was never fully conquered by the Osmanlis. Like the Montenegrins, the Albanians were always {211} able to resist the extension of Turkish authority in their mountains. Not only did the nature of the country favour them, but their proximity to the Adriatic, and their ability to call at will for Italian and Austrian help, made it advisable for the Supreme Porte to compromise with them. Many Albanians, including principally, as in Bosnia, the landowning families, were converted to Mohammedanism, and attached themselves to the fortunes of Turkey. Without ever giving up their local independence, these renegade Albanians became the most loyal and efficient supporters of Ottoman authority _outside of Albania_.

Turkey has gained much from the Albanians. Her higher classes, endowed with extreme intelligence and physical activity, have been the most valuable civil and military officials that the Government has ever enjoyed. Because they were Moslems, they were able to take high positions in the army and government service. It is one of the most remarkable facts of Ottoman history that the great majority of the really great statesmen and soldiers of the Empire, if not of Christian ancestry, have been, and still are, Albanians. In strengthening the Turkish domination in the European provinces, after the period of decline set in, the Albanians have been indispensable. Their emigration from their mountains into Epirus, Old Servia, the valley of the Vardar, and the coast towns of Macedonia checked for a long time the conspiracies and rebellions of the Christian elements.

The Sultans of Turkey and their counsellors have always recognized the value of the Albanians. In {212} return for their great services to the Empire, they were allowed to retain their local privileges. This meant independence, in reality, rather than autonomy. They gave what taxes they pleased, or none. Military service was rendered upon their own terms. Christian Albanians, as well as Moslem, have preferred Ottoman sovereignty to any other. They have never thought of independence, because this would have brought them responsibilities and dangers from which, under the fetish of "the integrity of the Ottoman Empire," they were free. So they resisted every effort of Italian, Austrian, Slav, and Greek to weaken their allegiance to the Sultan. Turkey also allowed them to remain under the mediæval conditions in which they lived back in the fourteenth century. They wanted neither railways, roads, nor ports. Among all the subjects of the Sultan, the Albanians were best satisfied with the absolute lack of progress under Moslem rule. These are the reasons why the majority of Albanians want to return once more to the fold of Turkey.

The Young Turks were no more felicitous in their treatment of the Albanians than of the Greeks and Armenians. Without any consideration of the peculiar problems involved, they decided immediately, tackling every problem at once, that Albania must be civilized and that Ottoman sovereignty must work there in exactly the same way as in any other part of the Empire. Albanians must render military service, and submit to being sent wherever the authorities at Constantinople decided. Local independence must cease. Taxes must be paid regularly. When the {213} Albanians resisted, as they did immediately, an army was sent to pacify the country.

One cannot but sympathize with the principle laid down by the Minister of the Interior at Constantinople, that the central authority must be recognized and that the only way to stamp out the Albanian anarchy was to disarm the population. But the Young Turks knew no other way of doing this than by force. They did not realize that anarchy and lawlessness disappear only with education and economic progress. Instead of starting to "civilize" the Albanians by establishing schools and opening up the country with railways, they sent rapid-firing guns. In the summer of 1909, the rebellion was stamped out with ruthless cruelty by the burning of villages, the destruction of crops, and the seizing of cattle. Such measures were a very poor argument for the Albanian to induce him to comply with the disarmament decree. Under ordinary circumstances an Albanian would rather lose his leg than his gun. Under these circumstances, he preferred risking his life to giving up what he considered his only means of defence.

Every year the Albanian rebellion broke out afresh. Every year the Young Turks exhausted the strength and spent the resources of their armies in European Turkey against the invulnerable mountains of Albania. After every "pacification," Albania in arms was just as certain each May as the coming again of summer.

In 1912, when affairs were in a critical state as regards the Christian neighbours, the Cabinet in {214} Constantinople was once more engaged in the hopeless task of subduing Albanian opposition. The Albanians, however, seemed to gain strength rather than lose it. In September, 1912, I was in Uskub just four weeks before the Balkan War broke out. The Albanian chieftains were there, having made a truce for Ramazan (the sacred month of the Moslem fasting). They said to me that the next year, if the Turks did not stop persecuting them, they would take their army to Constantinople. Others were to get ahead of them, and they were to win their independence without having to fight the Turks again. The poor showing of the Turkish arms against the Greeks and Servians is very largely due to the exhaustion which had come to them through continuous and unsuccessful attempts to get the better of the Albanian uprisings. The Balkan States knew how severely the western Macedonian army had suffered in July and August, 1912. It was one of the considerations which decided them to strike at that moment.

THE TREATMENT OF THE ARABIC ELEMENT

In Asiatic Turkey there are supposed to be about eight million Arabic-speaking inhabitants. These figures may be an exaggeration, for no census has ever been taken. But the _vilayets_ are occupied almost exclusively by Arabs and races speaking Arabic. They form a half of the Empire's dominions in Asia, starting with the Taurus and Amanus ranges, south through Syria to Arabia and east and south-east through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.

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These large stretches of territory were never thoroughly conquered by the Turks. They did not settle there in the way they had done in the Balkan Peninsula, outside of Albania and Montenegro, and in Asia Minor. The race from whom they had taken their religion and from whom they soon absorbed whatever culture and art they can be said to possess, was never assimilated by the Turks. Their simple warrior and herdsman language was enriched by Arabic substantives, as Anglo-Saxon was enriched by the Latin gotten through the Normans and through the Church. But there was no racial fusion.

Only in appearance did Turkish officialdom and the authority of the Sultan ever get a real hold over the Arabs. By habit they came to respect the Sultan as Khalif. The allegiance which they gave him as ruler was altogether without value--a pure matter of form. An aggressive pasha found it easy to detach Egypt from Turkish rule. It was conglomerate populations and a lack of natural boundaries for forming states that prevented the other Arabic portions of the Ottoman Empire from following Egypt. In Arabia proper, and in the larger portion of Mesopotamia, up to the present day, the Arabs have been as independent of the Sublime Porte as have been the Albanians.

In the reign of Abdul Hamid, when the idea of the Pan-Islamic movement was conceived, the importance of joining the sacred cities of Medina and Mecca more closely with the Turkish Empire was recognized. French interests were building a railway across the Lebanon Mountains to Aleppo and Damascus. The {216} Germans had launched their project for the _Bagdadbahn_. Abdul Hamid decided to create a railway directly under government control, from Damascus to Medina and Mecca. For the first time since they were joined to the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic provinces saw themselves in prospective connection with the capital. It had been for a long time easier and quicker to go from Constantinople to the United States or to China than to Bagdad or to Mecca. The railways would have one of two results: either the Arabs would be brought more closely into connection with the Empire, or they would be definitely alienated from it.

The Arabic question stood thus when the constitution was re-established in 1908. There are many Arabs among the Young Turks, but these, like the Slavs in the military and official service of Austria-Hungary, have been definitely alienated from their own nationality. Here was the opportunity to bring into sympathy with the constitutional movement the millions of Arabic-speaking subjects of the Sultan, who formed the most numerous Moslem element in the Empire. But the Young Turks were no more tactful in the treatment of the Arabs, who were mostly of their own religion, than of the Greeks and Armenians. In the first Parliament, they were almost as unfair to Moslem Arabs as to Christians. In the apportionment of places in the Cabinet, the Arabs were ignored. It is true that some Cabinet members, some high officials both in the military and civil administration, and some members of the inner council of the Committee of Union and Progress {217} were of Arabic origin. But they must be counted practically as Turks, for they had lived so long away from their own country and their people that they had lost all Arabic sympathies. Some who were called Arabs were in reality members of the old Turkish families, who in Mesopotamia, as in Syria and Egypt, had received large tracts of land at the time of the conquest, and had always been Turks by interests and by atmosphere. The younger nationalistic Arabic element, educated, and living by professional or business interests in cities of the Arabic portion of the Empire, were from the very beginning ignored.

Two things soon became evident. In the first place, the Young Turks tried to impose their language in local administration as the sole official language of the Empire. In many places in Syria and Mesopotamia, civil officials, even in the courts of justice, were appointed without a knowledge of the language of the people among whom they had to serve. In the Balkans and in Asia Minor, where there were so many races and so many tongues, the Turks were acting reasonably and sensibly in imposing their own language as a medium for the transaction of government business, but in _vilayets_ which were _wholly_ Arabic speaking, the foisting of the Turkish language upon the people could be likened to a bastard child endeavouring to rule the branch of his family from which he had received his best and purest blood. Before a year had passed, the educated, intellectual Arabs were wholly out of sympathy with the new _régime_. Many of them began to dream of the revival of {218} the Arabian khalifate, and looked to the nationalistic movement in Egypt as the seed from which their Pan-Arabic tree would some day grow. Others, older and less sentimental, did not hesitate to express a desire to see British or French sovereignty extended over Syria and Mesopotamia.

In the second place, among the quasi-independent tribes of the Syrian _hinterland_, and of the Arabian peninsula, the attempt of the Turks to destroy their privileges ended in the same way as it had done in Albania. From 1908 up to the outbreak of the Balkan War, millions of treasure and thousands of the best soldiers of the Empire were lost in fruitless efforts to realize the aspirations of the Young Turks. We cannot even enumerate these rebellions. They were as perennial as the Albanian uprisings, and as disastrous to the Turkish army. In Arabia, rebellious Arabs treated with the Italians. In Syria, beyond the Jordan, they made a practice of tearing up the tracks and burning the stations of the Hedjaz railway. In Mesopotamia, they refused to respond to the obligation of military service.

This incomplete summary of the Young Turk _régime_ in the Ottoman Empire has been given to throw light upon the collapse of the constitutional _régime_ and of the military reputation of Turkey. I have refrained from going into a discussion of party politics, of intrigues, and of the bickerings of Parliament. Enough has been told to show that the constitutional _régime_ was marked for failure from the beginning for three reasons: There was no honest {219} attempt to bring together the various races of the Empire in a common effort for regeneration. The Young Turks, having no statesmen among their leaders, depended upon untrained men and upon those Abdul Hamid had trained in sycophancy and despotism. In spite of the heroic and able efforts of the German military mission and the British naval mission, no progress was made in reforming the only force by which the Young Turks could have held in respect and obedience the Sultan's own subjects, as well as those foreign nations who were looking for the opportunity to dismember the Empire.

If the hopes of the true friends of Turkey had been realized, if only the constitution had been applied, if only there had been the _will_ to regenerate Turkey, all the wars of the past few years, including the one which is now shaking Europe to its foundations, would have been avoided.

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