and the Armenians, our attempted dictation is resented.  In the language of the frontier, we have butted into a game in which we are not wanted.  It is no game for up-lifters or amateurs.  England, France, Italy and Greece are not in this game to bring order out of chaos but to establish “spheres of influence.”  They are not thinking about self-determination and the rights of little peoples and making the world safe for Democracy; they are thinking in terms of future commercial and territorial advantage.  They are playing for the richest stakes in the history of the world:  for the control of the Bosphorus and the Bagdad Railway—­for whoever controls them controls the trade routes to India, Persia, and the vast, untouched regions of Transcaspia; the commercial domination of Western Asia, and the overlordship of that city which stands at the crossroads of the Eastern World and its political capital of Islam.

In order better to appreciate the subtleties of the game which they are playing, let us glance over the shoulders of the players, and get a glimpse of their hands.  Take England to begin with.  Unless I am greatly mistaken, England is not in favor of a complete dismemberment of Turkey or the expulsion of the Sultan from Constantinople.  This is a complete volte face from the sentiment in England immediately after the war, but during the interim she has heard in no uncertain terms from her 100,000,000 Mohammedan subjects in India, who look on the Turkish Sultan as the head of their religion and who would resent his humiliation as deeply, and probably much more violently, than the Roman Catholics would resent the humiliation of the Pope.  British rule in India, as those who are in touch with Oriental affairs know, is none too stable, and the last thing in the world England wants to do is to arouse the hostility of her Moslem subjects by affronting the head of their faith.  England will unquestionably retain control of Mesopotamia for the sake of the oil wells at the head of the Persian Gulf, the control which it gives her of the eastern section of the Bagdad Railway, and because of her belief that scientific irrigation will once more transform the plains of Babylonia into one of the greatest wheat-producing regions in the world.  She may, and probably will, keep her oft-repeated promises to the Jews by erecting Palestine into a Hebrew kingdom under British protection, if for no other reason than its value as a buffer state to protect Egypt.  She will also, I assume, continue to foster and support the policy of Pan-Arabism, as expressed In the new Kingdom of the Hedjaz, not alone for the reason that control of the Arabian peninsula gives her complete command of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as a highroad from Egypt to her new protectorate of Persia, but because she hopes, I imagine, that her protege, the King of Hedjaz, as Sheriff of Mecca, will eventually supplant the Sultan as the religious head of Islam. (It is interesting to note, in passing,