In order better to appreciate the subtleties of the game which they are playing, let us glance over the shoulders of the players, and get a glimpse of their hands. Take England to begin with. Unless I am greatly mistaken, England is not in favor of a complete dismemberment of Turkey or the expulsion of the Sultan from Constantinople. This is a complete _volte face_ from the sentiment in England immediately after the war, but during the interim she has heard in no uncertain terms from her 100,000,000 Mohammedan subjects in India, who look on the Turkish Sultan as the head of their religion and who would resent his humiliation as deeply, and probably much more violently, than the Roman Catholics would resent the humiliation of the Pope. British rule in India, as those who are in touch with Oriental affairs know, is none too stable, and the last thing in the world England wants to do is to arouse the hostility of her Moslem subjects by affronting the head of their faith. England will unquestionably retain control of Mesopotamia for the sake of the oil wells at the head of the Persian Gulf, the control which it gives her of the eastern section of the Bagdad Railway, and because of her belief that scientific irrigation will once more transform the plains of Babylonia into one of the greatest wheat-producing regions in the world. She may, and probably will, keep her oft-repeated promises to the Jews by erecting Palestine into a Hebrew kingdom under British protection, if for no other reason than its value as a buffer state to protect Egypt. She will also, I assume, continue to foster and support the policy of Pan-Arabism, as expressed In the new Kingdom of the Hedjaz, not alone for the reason that control of the Arabian peninsula gives her complete command of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as a highroad from Egypt to her new protectorate of Persia, but because she hopes, I imagine, that her protege, the King of Hedjaz, as Sheriff of Mecca, will eventually supplant the Sultan as the religious head of Islam. (It is interesting to note, in passing, that, as a result of the protectorates which she has proclaimed over Mesopotamia, Palestine, Arabia and Persia, England has, as a direct result of the war, obtained control of new territories in Asia alone having an area greater than that of all the states east of the Mississippi put together, with a population of some 20,000,000.) Though England would unquestionably welcome the United States accepting a mandate for Constantinople, which would ensure the neutrality of the Bosphorus, and for Armenia, which, under American protection, would form a stabilized buffer state on Mesopotamia's northern border, I am convinced that, even if the United States refuses such mandates, the British Government will oppose the serious humiliation of the Sultan-Khalif, or the complete dismemberment of his dominions.