ion,
they will be able to maintain their independence, for there is no
considerable body of Turks which can seriously threaten them. But the
Syrian Arabs, so long as the war lasts, are being, and will be, the
victims of a quiet scheme of extermination, which, if long continued,
will be as complete as that devised and carried out by the butchers of
Constantinople for the peoples of Armenia. It is not in the interest of
the Germans to save them, and no check is being put on Jemal the Great
to hinder him from assisting starvation and typhus to ravage the
country, and supplementing their deadly work by court-martial without
trial.

Equally significant of the rage for the destruction of Arabs was the
treatment of the Bagdad Arab army corps. In spite of the need for troops
one half of it was sent from Bagdad to Erzerum in the depth of winter,
without any provision of warm clothing. There, in those cold uplands,
the men died at the rate of fifty to sixty a day. Their commanding
officer was a Turk, and a creature of Enver's, called Abdul Kader.
Though these troops had fought admirably, he openly called them Arab
traitors, and his orders seem to have been merely to get rid of them.
There were no courts-martial; they were just taken into a climate which
killed them.

While for the last thirty years the Armenians and Syrians have emigrated
in large numbers from the Ottoman Empire, there has been a large
immigration of Jews into it. This movement was originally due to the
persecution they suffered in Russia. Germany and Austria were closed to
them, and, flying from the hideous pogroms that threatened them with
extermination, they begun to settle in Palestine. Wealthy compatriots
such as Baron Edmond de Rothschild assisted them, and, with the amazing
versatility of their race, they, trades-people and town-folk, adapted
themselves to new conditions, turned their wits towards husbandry and
agriculture, and during the last thirty years have flourished and
multiplied in a manner quite unrealised by the western world. In 1881
there were not more than 25,000 of them in the home of their race, but
by the beginning of the European War, when their immigration ceased for
the present, they numbered 120,000 souls. Till then the Ottoman
Government adopted the ancient Turkish policy of neglect towards them,
for they were not powerful enough numerically to earn the honour of a
massacre, and, in addition, they were useful settlers. Backed by
pow