The policy of neutrality will impose on us the obligation of avoiding to side with either of the belligerents, but the same policy will force us to take all the necessary measures for safeguarding our interests and our frontiers. If it be true, as reported, that the pacificist tendencies of Turkey constitute one of the safest guarantees of peace in the Balkans, then we must hope that on the day when a general settlement of accounts will be made Europe will be willing to recognize the important part played by Turkey in the preservation of peace in the Near East, and will be eager to rectify, if not all, at least one part of the wrongs she has caused to our country. TURKEY LEARNS OF THE WAR. _Turkish mobilization was still at its first stages when the European war began on Aug. 1, 1914. The Turkish Government in particular and the Turkish population in general were overwhelmed by the unexpected turn of European events, and it was at the height of the crisis that Turkey received the news of her two battleships building in British yards being taken over by England. A correspondent of The Daily Atlantis of New York, writing in Constantinople on Aug. 10, said:_ The European war makes the Turks think that this is their golden opportunity for turkifying the empire from the one end to the other. All non-Moslems, mere boys and young men of 25 to 30 years of age and grown men up to 45, are being arrested by the police and secret service force, and dragged to the barracks, like convicts, and if they fail to pay the fifty or eighty pounds Turkish ($230 or $350) for exemption from military service, they are forced to work as "assistant-soldiers." The soldiers thus designated are not given rifles, nor are they trained for service, but are simply employed as servants to the regular soldiers. It is easy to understand that no one can endure such conditions of military life, the result being that each and every one of these non-Moslems sells whatever property he has in order to pay the ransom and get away from the army, and from Turkey as well. In ten days, since this peculiar recruiting began, fully ten thousand Greeks found a way of escaping from Constantinople, many of them finding a refuge in the free and hospitable United States. This getting away is not so easy, writes the same correspondent, because officials of the various ports are exacting heavy sums from the fugitives before letting them go. Graft and extortion in this case reign supreme, and it costs anywhere from three to fifteen pounds ($13 to $70) to "buy" a police or port official. This process, originating in Constantinople, is widespread in the provinces, and the sums paid in this way by the non-Moslems to escape military service amount to millions. "Let the infidels pay!" say the Turkish officials. "They have taken our ships, and they have to pay for it."