6. Our highest and most vital principle is to have entire independence, with which, as in the case of all other countries, we shall be able to develop ourselves both socially and economically. We are opposed to all restrictions which are but obstacles to our political, judicial, and economic development. The terms of the payment of our debts, which will certainly be settled, must not be contrary to the spirit of this principle. The terms of the Pact are in essence a declaration of independence from foreign control. They ignore the fact that Turkey lost the war, and should therefore expect to share the humiliations of her allies by being subjected to penalties and indemnities. As the Entente Powers have discovered at Lausanne, the Angora Government repudiates responsibility for the World War, and the logical consequences of defeat. The Turks who gathered for the adoption of a program of resistance to the Entente Powers and Greece in the autumn of 1920 assumed that their revolutionary government was the rightful heir to all the titles and privileges of the old Ottoman Empire, but to none of its treaty obligations and its responsibilities in connection with the lost war or the horrible massacres and deportations of Greeks and Armenians during the war. The four territorial articles of the Pact in no sense constitute a confession of the altered position of Turkey because of her defeat. The Arabic-speaking portions of the Empire are not given up. They are to decide their future by a plebiscite, regardless of the mandates of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. The result of the plebiscite might well be a decision to remain within the Ottoman Empire. Aside from the Arabs, there is no question of a plebiscite, except for the three provinces of the Caucasus which Turkey held in the last year of the war. “Portions of the Ottoman territory within as well as outside the armistice line ... constitute an indivisible whole.” This means the flat denial of Kurdish, Armenian, and Greek aspirations. Article 3 calls into question the line agreed upon in the Treaty of London with the Balkan states in May, 1913. Article 4 admits in regard to the Straits only what had always been an international privilege, the “opening of the Straits to world commerce.” Article 5, dealing with minorities, establishes the principle of reciprocity. The Turks hope for reciprocal guarantees with neighboring states, and they refuse to assent to any more specific guarantees than those the Entente Powers cause to be inserted in the treaty with enemy states and the smaller countries that were to profit by the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire.