Lastly, what is to be the fate of Asia Minor?  There can be no question that the Russians must be allowed to occupy and retain the whole of Turkish Armenia.  They will thus be conferring a benefit upon humanity and ending one of the most grinding and barbarous tyrannies that the modern world has ever seen; the progress made by the Armenians under Russian rule during the past twenty years is a happy augury for the future of this race when once united in common allegiance to the Tsar, under a wise system of local autonomy.  But will the Ottoman Empire be able to survive when shorn of its European possessions, of its Armenian and Arab populations?  Will not Italy demand her share of the spoils, and side by side with the French in Syria, assume in friendly rivalry the protectorate of Cilicia from a point east of Adalia as far as the gulf of Alexandretta?  Will it be possible to arrest the process of disintegration even at this stage?  Will not Greece attempt to annex Smyrna and at least a portion of its hinterland, or has she not at least as good a title as any other competitor?  Here, again, it would be absurd to attempt any answer for the present, but we must at least be prepared for the possibility of a transformation as rapid and as overwhelming in Asiatic Turkey as that which freed the Balkans from the Turkish nightmare two short years ago.  In Asia, as in Europe, the war is the prelude to a new era, and Britain is faced with the alternative of weakly abandoning her Imperial mission or assuming still greater responsibilities.  “The Turkish Empire has committed suicide, and dug with its own hand its grave,” and to Britain will fall more fully than ever before the leadership of the Mahommedan world.  The loyalty and devotion of the Moslem community in India can best be repaid by the most scrupulous and sympathetic attention to the interests of Islam throughout the world.

Sec.16. Russia and Poland.—­It is no mere accident that Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey should be ranged on the same side in the great European struggle; for they represent, each in its own way, those false conceptions of nationality which have so long envenomed the public life of Europe, and which, for want of better words, have been described as Germanisation, Magyarisation, and Turkification.  It would, however, be flagrantly untrue to suggest that those three States enjoyed a monopoly of racial intolerance; for the ideas on nationality which dominated official Russia under the old absolutist regime and which so rapidly regained the upper hand under Stolypin and the triumphant bureaucracy, struck at the very root of tolerance and political liberty.  But recent years have revealed a subtle change of attitude.  The policy of Russification had not been abandoned; indeed in Finland and the Ukraine it survived in its most odious form.  But it was none the less possible to detect a growing note of interrogation even among the bureaucracy, and still more an increasing movement