That may sound flippant, as it is, but it sums up in a single paragraph the extraordinary political situation which exists in Turkey to-day.  Little more than a year ago Turkey surrendered in defeat, her resources exhausted, her armies destroyed or scattered.  If anything in the world seemed certain at that time it was that the redhanded nation, whose very name has for centuries been a synonym for cruelty and oppression, would disappear from the map of Europe, if not from the map of the world, at the behest of an outraged civilization.  The Turkish Government committed the most outrageous crime of the entire war when it organized the systematic extermination of the Armenians.  Its former Minister of War, Enver Pasha, has been quoted as cynically remarking, “If there are no more Armenians there can be no Armenian question.”  A people capable of such barbarity ought no longer be permitted to sully Europe with their presence:  they ought to be driven back into those savage Anatolian regions whence they came and kept there, just as those suffering from a less objectionable form of leprosy are confined on Molokai.  But the fervor of a year ago for expelling the Turks from Europe is rapidly dying down.  In the spring of 1919 Turkey could have been partitioned by the Allies with comparatively little friction.  No one expected it more than Turkey herself.  Whenever she heard a step on the floor, a knock at the door, she keyed herself for the ordeal of the anesthetic and the operating table.  But the ancient jealousies and rivalries of the Entente nations, which had been forgotten during the war, returned with peace and now it looks as though, as a result of these nations’ distrust and suspicion of each other, the Turks would win back by diplomacy what they lost in battle.  How History repeats itself!  The Turks have often been unlucky in war and then had a return of luck at the peace table.  It was so after the Russo-Turkish War, when the Congress of Berlin tore up the Treaty of San Stefano.  It was so to a lesser extent after the Balkan wars, when the interference of the European Concert enabled Turkey to recover Adrianople and a portion of the Thracian territory which she had lost to Bulgaria.  And now it looks as though she were once again to escape the punishment she so richly merits.  If she does, then History will chronicle few more shameful miscarriages of justice.

If the people of the United States could know for a surety of the avarice, the selfishness, the cynicism which have marked every step of the negotiations relative to the settlement of the Near Eastern Question, if they were aware of the chicanery and the deceit and the low cunning practised by the European diplomatists, I am convinced that there would be an irresistible demand that we withdraw instantly from participation in the affairs of Southeastern Europe and of Western Asia.  Why not look the facts in the face?  Why not admit that these affairs are, after all, none of our concern, and that, by every one save the Turks