dead! Long live Turkey!”[42] With this amazing program Mustapha Kemal Pasha undertook to liberate Turkey. In April, 1920, the government of the Grand National Assembly was instituted in Angora and proceeded to administer those portions of Anatolia which were not under Allied or Greek occupation. The proposed Treaty of Sèvres—which was handed to the Turkish delegates at Paris on May 11—was condemned as inconsistent with the legitimate national aspirations of the Turkish people. The Allies and the Constantinople Government were denounced—the former as invaders of the sacred soil of Turkey, the latter as tools of European imperialists. Then followed a series of successful military campaigns: by October, 1920, the French position in Cilicia had been rendered untenable, the Armenian Republic had been obliterated, the British forces of occupation had been forced back into the Ismid peninsula, and the Italians had withdrawn their troops to Adalia. In the spring of 1921 separate treaties were negotiated with Russia, Italy, and France, providing for a cessation of military operations and for the evacuation of certain Turkish territories.[43] Then came the long, bitter struggle against the Greeks, terminating with the Mudania armistice of October 10, 1922, which assured to the Turks the return of Smyrna and portions of Thrace. On November 1, the Sultanate was abolished, and Turkey became a republic. Four days later the Turkish Nationalists entered Constantinople in triumph. The struggle for the territorial and administrative integrity of a New Turkey seemed to be won. The victory of the Nationalists scrapped the Treaty of Sèvres and called for a complete readjustment of the Near Eastern situation. When the first Lausanne Conference for Peace in the Near East assembled on November 20, 1922, there were high hopes that a just and lasting settlement might be arrived at. The conference was only a few days old, however, when the time-honored obstacles to peace in the Levant made their appearance: the rival diplomatic policies of the Great Powers; the desire of the West, by means of the Capitulations, to maintain a firm hold upon its vested interests in the East; the imperialistic struggle of rival concessionaires, supported by their respective governments, for possession of the raw materials, the markets, and the communications of Asiatic Turkey. Once more the Bagdad Railway, with its tributary lines in Anatolia and Syria, became one of the stakes of diplomacy! BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES [1] C. J. H. Hayes, _A Brief History of the Great War_ (New York, 1920), pp. 71–72; “A Rival to the Bagdad Line,” in _The Near East_, May 25, 1917. [2] _Supra_, Chapter V.