confront it, and no concentration of nationals
could be looked for from the Armenia Irredenta of Diarbekr, Urfa, Aleppo,
Aintab, Marash, Adana, Kaisariyeh, Sivas, Angora, and Trebizond (not to
mention farther and more foreign towns), until public security was assured
in what for generations has been a cockpit. The Kurd is, of course, an
Indo-European as much as the Armenian, and rarely a true Moslem; but it
would be a very long time indeed before these facts reconciled him to the
domination of the race which he has plundered for three centuries. Most of
the Osmanlis of eastern Asia Minor are descendants of converted Armenians;
but their assimilation would be slow and doubtful. Islam, more rapidly and
completely than any other creed, extinguishes racial sympathies and groups
its adherents anew.

The Anatolian Greeks are less numerous but not less difficult to provide
for. The scattered groups of them on the plateau--in Cappadocia, Pontus,
the Konia district--and on the eastward coast-lands would offer no serious
difficulty to a lord of the interior. But those in the western
river-basins from Isbarta to the Marmora, and those on the western and
north-western littorals, are of a more advanced and cohesive political
character, imbued with nationalism, intimate with their independent
nationals, and actively interested in Hellenic national politics. What
happens at Athens has long concerned them more than what happens at
Constantinople; and with Greece occupying the islands in the daily view of
many of them, they are coming to regard themselves more and more every day
as citizens of Graecia Irredenta. What is to be done with these? What, in
particular, with Smyrna, the second city of the Ottoman Empire and the
first of 'Magna Graecia'? Its three and a half hundred thousand souls
include the largest Greek urban population resident in any one city. Shall
it be united to Greece? Greece herself might well hesitate. It would prove
a very irksome possession, involving her in all sorts of continental
difficulties and risks. There is no good frontier inland for such an
_enclave_. It could hardly be held without the rest of westernmost Asia,
from Caria to the Dardanelles, and in this region the great majority of
the population is Moslem of old stocks, devotedly attached both to their
faith and to the Osmanli tradition.

The present writer, however, is not among the prophets. He has but tried
to set forth what may delay and what may pr