een to be driven across South-eastern Europe between
Austro-German efforts and the fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter
can safely be left in Turkish hands yet a while longer, until the day
comes for their partition into "spheres of influence," just as Persia
and parts of China are to-day being apportioned between Russia and
England. This happy consummation, moreover, has fallen from heaven,
and Turkey is being cut up for the further extension of British
interests clearly by the act of God.

The victory of the Balkan States becomes another triumph for the
British Bible; it is the victory of righteousness over wrong-doing.

The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the possibility of
their being moulded into an anti-German factor of great weight in the
European conflict, clearly impending, and in their offering a fresh
obstacle, it is hoped, to German world policy.

Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these
professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan Allies
to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and historic basis.

Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces
by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die sword may take
away. When the sword was struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right
to anything it had given him fell too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has
held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror
who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral
claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.

But the moral argument brings strange revenges.

If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace--"right of sword to be
shattered by the sword"--what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin,
to Cork? She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which
Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika--a right of
invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. If Turkey's rights, nearly
six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful
campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that
this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries,
then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished a precedent
in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should
not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be
rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed
somewhat worse