Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces by a right of conquest only.  What the sword took, die sword may take away.  When the sword was struck from the Ottoman’s grasp his right to anything it had given him fell too.  Thus Adrianople, a city he has held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim’s soldiers.

But the moral argument brings strange revenges.

If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace—­“right of sword to be shattered by the sword”—­what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork?  She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika—­a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization.  If Turkey’s rights, nearly six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries, then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished a precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia.  And when the day of defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912-13 and a freed Ireland shall be justified on the very grounds England to-day has been the first to advance against a defeated Turkey.

“But the Turk is an Asiatic,” say the English Bashaws:  to which indeed, Europe might aptly reply, “and are the English European or non-European?” The moral argument, and the “Asiatic argument” are strange texts for the desecrater of Christian Ireland to appeal to against that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan and Indian battleships, and Canadian and Australasian dreadnoughts.  Not the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed British attitude in the present war.

The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her Christian peoples is only the pretext:  but just as the moral argument brings its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that has suffered all that Macedonia has suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not of Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from benefiting Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment.

The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the Western seaways.  To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle.