and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race. . . . We do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople." This declaration was interpreted by what remained of the Opposition in Constantinople, to mean that the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, was in a position to renew his old understanding with the Caliph.
On Feb. 1, Soviet Russia abrogated the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 and the British Foreign Office "shook hands with murder" to the extent of concurring in the abrogation. But the 1907 Treaty had already worked out to its ghastly fruition. Nothing remained of Persia's independence but an imprisoned Shah at Teheran. The Caliphate of Islam was destroyed, and few countries have ever been flogged into such ruin as now prevailed in the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire.
On March 2, Germany imposed its peace terms on Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, detaching the Ukraine from Russia, embedding the Black Sea firmly in the Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme (the old Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme had been left in the air by the British capture of Bagdad), and making over Batum to the Turks. A Turco-German conference at Trebizond on the Black Sea speedily effected a joint policy for Trans-Caucasia, under whose terms Baku was named as the capital of a new Trans-Caucasian State to be christened "Azerbaijan," presumably after the Azerbaijan province in north-west Persia which it was proposed to claim as an irredentum for the new State. An Ottoman Army,
