not lightly change its aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople, he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new regime for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes, in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign Office may be not distant.
We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament, they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally attained a degree of nationhood "one and indivisible" which is far beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain. Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported from the land in which
