r aim in the war,
which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any
cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and
Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years.
And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields
that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the
Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of
Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople
and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of
that murderous tyranny for ever.

We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try
to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the
confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great
crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite
useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within
the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians
shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a
century's failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for
instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the
Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every
Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them.
The _soi-disant_ protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in
securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to
bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable
yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations,
which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples
in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of
covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to
repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be
hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, _ipso
facto_, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of
whom such a province is placed.

The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at
first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such
a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even
the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar
adjustments made by the Concert of Europ