The bespectacled professor of ancient history is best qualified to trace the beginning of this game; for there is no other frontier on the face of the globe over which there has been so much fighting as over that strip of water which divides Europe from Asia, called, in its four separate parts, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, and the Aegean Sea.  Centuries before men began to date their calendars “A.D.,” the city on the Bosporus was a prize for which nations struggled.  All the old-world dominions—­Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Roman—­fought here; and for hundreds of years Byzantium was the capital of the Roman and Christian world.  The Crusaders and the Saracens did a choice lot of fighting over this battle-ground; and it was here that the doughty warrior, Paul of Tarsus, broke into Europe, as first invader in the greatest of conquests.  Along this narrow line of beautiful blue water the East menacingly confronts the West.  Turkey’s capital, as a sort of Mr.-Facing-Both-Ways, bestrides the water; for Scutari, in Asia, is essentially a part of Greater Constantinople.  That simple geographical fact really pictures Turkey’s present condition:  it is rent by the struggle of the East with the West, Asia with Europe, in its own body.

“The great game” of to-day, rather than of any hoary and romantic yesterday, holds the interest of the modern man.  Player Number One, even though he sits patiently in the background in seeming stolidity, is big-boned, brawny, hairy, thirsty Russia.  Russia wants water, both here and in the far East.  His whole being cries from parched depths for the taste of the salt waters of the Mediterranean and the China Sea.  At present his ships may not pass through the Dardanelles:  the jealous Powers have said so.  But Russia is the most patient nation on earth; his “manifest destiny” is to sit in the ancient seat of dominion on the Bosporus.  Calmly, amid all the turbulence of international politics, he awaits the prize that is assuredly his; but while he waits he plots and mines and prepares for ultimate success.  A past master of secret spying, wholesale bribery, and oriental intrigue, is the nation which calls its ruler the “Little Father” on earth, second only to the Great Father in heaven.  If one is curious and careful, one may learn which of the Turkish statesmen are in Russian pay.

Looming larger—­apparently—­than Russia amid the minarets upon the lovely Constantinople horizon is Germany, the Marooned Nation.  Restless William shrewdly saw that Turkey offered him the likeliest open door for German expansion and for territorial emancipation.  So he played courtier to his “good friend, Abdul Hamid,” and to the Prophet Mohammed (they still preserve at Damascus the faded remains of the wreath he laid upon Saladin’s tomb the day he made the speech which betrayed Europe and Christendom), and in return had his vanity enormously ministered to.  His visit to Jerusalem is probably the most notable incident in the history of the Holy City since the Crusades.  Moreover, he carried away the Bagdad Railway concession in his carpet-bag.  By this he expects to acquire the cotton and grain fields of Mesopotamia, which he so sorely needs in his business, and also to land at the front door of India, in case he should ever have occasion to pay a call, social or otherwise, upon his dear English cousins.