At the present time, forty or fifty thousand[58] Russian emigrants, fleeing before the Bolshevists, have reached Pera and have settled down in it; others are arriving there every day, who belong to the revolutionary socialist party—an exiled party temporarily—or who are more or less disguised Bolshevist agents. It is obvious that all these Russians will not soon leave Constantinople, which they have always coveted, especially as the Bolshevists have by no means renounced the designs of the Tsars on this city or their ambitions in the East. Not long ago, according to the _Lokal Anzeiger_,[59] a prominent member of the Soviet Government declared that, to safeguard the Russian interests in the East and on the Black Sea, Constantinople must fall to Russia. Being thus invaded by Russian elements of all kinds, Constantinople seems doomed to be swallowed up by Russia as soon as her troubles are over, whether she remains Bolshevist or falls under a Tsar’s rule again; then she will turn her ambition towards the East, which we have not been able to defend against the Slavs, and England will find her again in her way in Asia and even on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, as Germany is endeavouring to come to an understanding with Russia and as the military Pan-Germanist party has not given up hope of restoring the Kaiser to the throne, if the Allies dismembered Turkey—whose policy is not historically linked with that of Germany, and who has no more reason for being her ally now, provided the Allies alter their own policy—they would pave the way to a union of the whole of Eastern Europe under a Germano-Russian hegemony. Again, the Turks, who originally came from Asia, are now a Mediterranean people owing to their great conquests and their wide extension in the fifteenth century, and though in some respects these conquests may be regretted, they have on the whole proved beneficial to European civilisation, by maintaining the influence of the culture of antiquity. Though they have driven back the Greeks to European territories, they have not, on the whole, attempted to destroy the traditions bequeathed to us by antiquity, and the Turk has let the quick, clever Greek settle down everywhere. His indolence and fatalism have made him leave things as they were. What would have happened if the Slavs had come down to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea? The Bulgars and Southern Slavs, though they were subjected to Greco-Latin influences, displayed much more activity and were proof against most of these influences. But the Turks checked the Slavs’ advance to the south; and, were it only in this respect, they have played and still play a salutary part of which they should not be deprived.