With the German power replaced by the French, the Russian for the moment in abeyance, French and Italian influences competing in Turkey, French and British aims clashing in the Arab regions wrested from Turkey--while indignation at Occidental interference surges in the minds of all the peoples of the Orient--the Eastern Mediterranean offers a situation which tempts one to ask whether the authors of that policy have not succeeded too well? Whether in pursuing the success of the day--to which their personal reputations were attached--they did not lose sight of the morrow? Whether they have not scattered the seed without sufficiently heeding the crop? However that may be, unless this situation was clearly foreseen by its creators and provided for--a hypothesis {237} which, with the utmost goodwill towards them, does not appear very probable--they have an anxious task--a task that, under these conditions, demands from British statesmanship more thinking about the Near Eastern question and the Greek factor in it than was necessary before 1914. As a first aid to an appreciation of the problem by the public--which the present crisis found utterly unprepared--it would have been well if the fundamental differences between the respective attitudes of France and England towards each other and towards the peoples concerned had been candidly acknowledged, and all pretence of Franco-British co-operation in the Near East abandoned. Lasting co-operation cannot be where there is neither community of interests nor consonance of ideas: where the loss of one party is welcomed as gain by the other, and the wisdom of the one in the eyes of the other is folly. Pious talk of a common Allied mission in the Near East has only served to obscure issues and to render confusion in the public mind worse confounded. It was idle to make a mystery of the support given by France to the Turks and of her insistence on the revision of the Sevres Treaty--preliminary steps to her demand for the evacuation of Chanak and the consequent elimination of British sea-power. The object of these tactics was evident to every serious student of history: France pursues now the plan laid down by Louis XIV, continued by Napoleon, fitfully carried on throughout the nineteenth century, and facilitated by her installation in Syria--the equivalent of the German _Drang nach Osten_: a plan incompatible with the safety of the British Empire in the East. This is the truth of the matter, and nothing has been gained by hiding it. The people who fought a ruinous war without quite knowing the ends aimed at, had a right to know at least the results obtained; and after France's separate agreement with Turkey, the denial to them of any part of that knowledge could not be justified on any principle of honour or plea of expediency. {239} INDEX