civilisation--"were"
rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless
steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its
subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centres like Smyrna and
Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has
mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As for
the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre and
deportation since April, 1915--business and professional men, peasants
and shepherds, women and children--without discrimination or pity. A
third of the Ottoman Armenians may still survive; a tenth of them are
safe within the Russian and British lines. Fortunately half this nation,
and the majority of the Greeks, live outside the Ottoman frontiers, and
are beyond the Osmanli's power.

To compensate for its depopulation of the countries under its dominion,
the Ottoman Government, during the last fifty years, has been settling
them with Moslem immigrants from its own lost provinces or from other
Moslem lands that have changed their rulers. These "Mouhadjirs" are
reckoned, from first to last, at three-quarters of a million, drawn from
the most diverse stocks--Bosniaks and Pomaks and Albanians, Algerines
and Tripolitans, Tchetchens and Circassians. Numbers have been planted
recently on the lands of dispossessed Armenians and Greeks. They add
many more elements to the confusion of tongues, but they are probably
destined to be absorbed or to die out. The Circassians, in particular,
who are the most industrious (though most unruly) and preserve their
nationality best, also succumb most easily to transplantation, through
refusal to adapt their Caucasian clothes and habits to Anatolian or
Mesopotamian conditions of life.

All this is Turkey, and we come back to our original question: What
common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat of many
colours to one political hue? The answer is simple: Blood. Turkey, the
Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geographical, racial, or
economic; it is a pretension, enforced by bloodshed and violence
whenever and wherever the Osmanli Government has power.

It is a complex pretension. The first impulse, and the traditional
method by which it has been given effect, came from a little tribe of
pagan, nomadic Turks who wandered into Anatolia from Central Asia in the
thirteenth century A.D. and were granted camping grounds by the reigning
Turkish Sult