Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/267

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the Czarist archives at Petrograd.

Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history, deprived even of the tame Kerensky regime, the British Foreign Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen, with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.

The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does