. More important even than
this will be the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A naval base
must be formed, which by the gospel of the freedom of the seas (but not
according to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will constitute a
patrolling police force of the waters. Whether the system of
fortifications and defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles
impregnable shall be retained or not is a question demanding the most
careful consideration. Some will hold that they should be maintained in
order to insure that none but the guarantors of the freedom of the
Straits shall ever take possession of them: others that they shall be
utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the closing of the Straits
shall be an impossibility. The matter really turns on the question as to
the extent to which the Allies will have the prudence to cut Germany's
claws when the war is over. It is eminently to be hoped that they will
be cut so short that never again will they be able to show those
chiselled talons beyond her velvet--that sense, in fact, will allow
sentiment no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a great many people
the basis of whose character consists of a washy confidence in the good
intentions of everybody. Most mistakenly they call it Christianity.

Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the Allies' declared aims.
Such territories as Turkey holds in Europe, such control as she
possesses over the free passage of the Straits must pass from her, and
the alien peoples, who for centuries have fainted and bled underneath
her infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of bondage. As we have
seen throughout preceding chapters, it was the fixed policy of the
Ottoman Government to rid itself of their presence, and already it has
gone far in its murderous mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the
Allies, when accomplished, will do that work for her, for the Allies are
determined to remove those peoples from Turkey. The difference of
execution, however, consists in this, that they will not remove Arabs
and Greeks and Italians and Jews, as Turkey has already done with the
Armenians by the simple process of massacres, but by a process no less
simple, namely, of taking out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire
the districts where such peoples dwell. The Allies will accomplish, in
fact, for the Turks that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim of
Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim of his more murderous successors.
Turkey sh