The nearness to America of the European theatre of war so greatly fills our minds with the contest there raging that we give but little thought to the progress of events in the far countries tributary to the Tigris River. For a time, the heroic resistance of General Townsend to the Turkish forces which surrounded him aided by the natural obstacles of river and climate, claimed a share of our interest, and later, the splendid and successful work achieved by the new British army under General Maude, awakened renewed interest in a campaign designed to split Islam into two parts: one, acknowledging the domination of the Turk and his German masters; the other, a new Caliphat of Bagdad, Arabian, rather than Turkish, looking to the ideals of justice and freedom, rather than to the rule of the sword; finding its inspiraton in the tradition of the enlightened and humane Haroun-al-Raschid, rather than the warring, bloody conquerors and Muhammed and Suliman. Still later, the northward progress of British arms extended over the greater part of Palestine, and the capture of Jerusalem brought the sacred places of Israel and of Christianity within the control of Christendom after five centuries of Turkish occupation.
These campaigns are only second in importance to the progress of the German invasion of France; for if the British successes in Arabia and Palestine shall be maintained, and the Islamites of Egypt, Arabia and Mesopotamia shall look in the future to the Caliph of Bagdad, not to the Sultan of Turkey, as their spiritual head, the great German scheme of aggression in the Near East will have been defeated.
The subtle Teuton suggestion to the Turk of a Pan-Turanian league, was but a scheme for the promotion of a closer Turkish organization under German control, as Raemaekers' cartoon, "A Tid-Bit for the Sick Man," so cleverly intimates. The Turks should have said to themselves, "Beware of the Greeks—the Prussians—and the gifts they bring." A German gift is like the shirt of Nessus,—it will consume utterly those who accept it.
Not alone on the shores of the Mediterranean, but on the Persian Gulf, on the Baltic, on the English Channel, in the Caribbean, on the Pacific,—there is no limit to the schemes of expansion of German control to which that nation in its mad lust of power has given itself. Never since the dawn of recorded history has an issue been made so plain. Aut Cæsar aut nullus. The world must choose between Germany, the highly developed, hyperorganized, scientific state, proceeding on the openly avowed theory that might alone makes right, and that no principle of ethics, morality or religion must be allowed to affect or deter a course which scientific militarism determines to be best calculated to attain a pre-determined end, and the other nations, who believe in God and in His justice, who conceive that it doth not profit a nation to gain the whole world at the cost of its soul.
Once this issue is manifest to the world, the result cannot be in doubt.
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM.
