The Reorganisation of Europe.

This settlement of Turkey is a logical element in the Allies’ general aim in the War:—“The reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement, based alike upon the principle of nationalities, on the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development, and also upon territorial agreements and international arrangements so framed as to guarantee land and sea frontiers against unjust attacks.”

This aim is no invention of yesterday; it has been the aspiration of all lovers of liberty for a century past.

“Let the Turks,” said Mr. Gladstone in a famous speech, “now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying away themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.”

The province for which Mr. Gladstone pleaded was Bulgaria; but since Bulgaria has been freed, the other peoples who have still remained under the tyranny have suffered horrors infinitely worse in their extent and their iniquity than those which in 1876 aroused the indignation of the world.

Heinrich von Treitschke loved many things more than liberty, but the profanation of liberty by the Turk drew from him a denunciation as strong as Gladstone’s own. “A near future,” he writes, “will, it is to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such heathendom should ever have established itself on European soil. What has this Turkish Empire done in three entire centuries? It has done nothing but destroy.”

Treitschke and Gladstone, men who stood for very different ideals in Europe, both called with one voice for liberation from the Turk; and the Allies are struggling now to bring what they strove for to completion.