on, might have saved a great deal of trouble
afterwards, but it missed then, and more than misses now, the essential
and salient truth about Turkey. The phrase, unfortunately, still
continued to obtain credit, and nowadays it is a forgery; it rings
false.

For at whatever period we regard Turkey, and try to define that
monstrous phenomenon, we can make a far truer phrase than Lord
Aberdeen's. For Turkey is not a sick man: Turkey is a sickness. He is
not sick, nor ever has been, for he is the cancer itself, the devouring
tumour that for centuries has fed on living tissue, absorbing it and
killing it. It has never had life in itself, except in so far that the
power of preying on and destroying life constitutes life, and such a
power, after all, we are accustomed to call not life, but death. Turkey,
like death, continues to exist and to dominate, through its function of
killing. Life cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and from
the moment that Turkey passed from being a nomadic tribe moving
westwards from the confines of Persia, it has existed only and thrived
on a process of absorption and of murder. When first the Turks came out
of their Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when they grew more or less
settled, and by degrees the power of mere absorption, as by some failure
of digestion, left them, they killed. They became a huge tumour, that
nourished itself by killing the living tissues that came in contact
with it. Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas
than could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds
of years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying
character, Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with
greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is
threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its
crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia. Those claws are
already deeply set, and the problem for civilised nations is first to
disentangle the nippers that are cancer in a cancer, and next to deprive
of all power over alien peoples the domination that has already been
allowed to exist too long.

The object of this book is the statement of the case on which all
defenders of liberty base their prosecution against Turkey itself, and
against the Power that to-day has Turkey in its grip.

Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but in order to understand at
all adequately the case against Tur