The Orient question to-day and to-morrow

Front matter

fiEORlOT

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WMMImMim fiiass J3 -^ 3 Book

Foreword

This book is based on lectures which I delivered at Leland Stanford Junior University, California, U. S. A., just prior to the outbreak of the Balkan war in the autumn of 19 1 2, at the request of President David Starr Jordan, whose proposal to study the subjects of war and peace by scientific methods promises a trustworthy basis for the formation of practical conclusions.

The title of the lectures was " Servian Unification a Factor in World Peace." They included a consideration of the various international problems of the Near and Far East and their relation to the interests centred in the Balkan regions.

It was not my good fortune to have my proffered services as a soldier in the field required by the Servian Government. That restraint caused me profound sorrow,

Foreword

as since the founding of the first Macedonian Committee in 1886 for the freeing of the Christians from the Turk in the old Serb-lands, I have devoted the greater part of my life to that cause.

When I realised that circumstances made it impossible for me to take part with the armies in this most glorious campaign I decided to remain in America and speak on the Balkan situation, which I have done before Universities and other Educational Institutions.

Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich.

March, 20, 19 13.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. (General Considerations ...... i

A. General Survey ^(i

Chapter I

THE Immutable, underlying factors of the Balkan Problem constitute It an Integral and Important part of the world problems formed by the conflicting or Inter-mutual Interests which vibrate between Suez and Panama.

The Balkan Peninsula In Its relation to Suez forms the most Important key from the Occident to the Orient and the vast Oriental markets. Apart from those far-reaching and basic elements of the Balkan situation, the problems which are now being fought out not only on the Macedonian battle-fields, but In the Council Chambers of the world would have but restricted and local import.

I

Therefore a true understanding of the Balkan situation calls for some consideration of the so-called world aims, aspirations and interests of the great nations and the points where those aims converge and conflict. What is seen in the Balkan Problem to-day is not alone a Serb, a Bulgar, a Greek, or a Turk, but also a German, an Englishman, a Russian.

A real and definitive settlement of the Balkan question is possible as the result of the campaigns of the Balkan Allies, but such a definitive solution of that question is possible only on the basis of the " Balkans for the Balkans." That result would bring calm to one of the great storm-centres of Europe, where perennial strife and uncertainty must be pregnant with peril to the world. Incidentally, such a firm settlement would mean civilisation and progress to millions of people inhabiting those lands. But, whatever the outcome on the battle-field, it is to be feared that the peace-settlement under outside pressure will not be a settlement In the Interests of peace, Insuring stability, but that a make-shift will be arrived at leaving the situation full of open questions, door-ways through which a northern conqueror shall be able at a convenient hour to stride eastward and southward to Suez and to the attainment of that world mastery proclaimed In the inscriptions found on the palaces of the Hapsburgs — ■ " Austria Est Imperare Orbl Unlverso."

The present war is the last episode or last phase of a struggle which was begun by the Ottoman Turks five hundred years ago when they Invaded Europe and overthrew the then existing Servian, Bulgarian, and Greek States. In driving back the Turk to-day the Allies do not enter the land as conquerors, they are going home.

A nation never loses Its sovereignty. Individuals, bound together In community by ties of blood, language and traditions forming a nation, have the Inherent right to choose their form of government, the right to mould their own destiny, the right to create guarantees to Hfe, happiness and virtue. The right to live, to be good and to be happy is the inalienable birthright of the individual human being. To guarantee the full exercise of these rights to the individual is the duty of the nation. So too, has it the duty to demand and exact general recognition of those inalienable rights. A government which fails in that regard has lost its claim to existence, and the individual, the ultimate unit forming the nation has the right of recall, to be enforced, by peaceful means if possible, or, if need be, by violence — the right of revolution.

Conquest does not abolish the sovereignty of a nation. That sovereignty Is only held in abeyance while the rule of the conqueror lasts, and remains In abeyance only so long as the mlHtant force of the conqueror is strong enough to prevent its assertion. It is the right and the duty of a subjugated nation to revolt against and overthrow its conqueror. In that militant action lies the proof of its morality as a nation and of the honesty of its component Individuals. Instance of this is furnished in the history of every conquered nation. Vice and corruption prepare for and invite conquest — vice and corruption maintain a nation In subjection.

The Balkan peoples Inhabiting the lands which had been over-run and held in forcible subjection by the Turk proved their mettle by remaining In Insurrection either latent or active according to opportunity during several hundred years. Over these lands for five centuries hovered the Balkan vulture and multiplied for there was food for him; there was an endless cry of battle, an endless groan of the oppressed and tortured — an endless deathmoan. The sign of mastership of the wild hordes of Islam was massacre unavenged by Christendom. Where the arts of peace had flourished, where material and moral well-being and learning had existed, for five hundred years the Turks spread waste and darkness.

Slowly one by one the Balkan peoples were able to partially free themselves and re-constitute part of their ancient States.

Montenegro, a remnant of the old Servian Empire, was never entirely conquered by the Ottomans.

In the dawn of the Nineteenth Century, following massacres of Servians by the Turks in the Pashalik of Belgrade the sturdy mountaineer Karageorge, in 1804, headed a revolution and freed that part of what had been Servia, followed by another mountaineer, Milosh Obrenovich. After eleven years of war the modern principality — later the Kingdom of Servia was founded. In 1821, after Turkish massacres of Greeks, the standard of revolt was raised in Greece and in 1830 the modern Kingdom of Greece was founded. In 1878, Russia, after the Bulgarian atrocities, swept the Turks from the old Bulgarlan lands and created modern Bulgaria. These four States, now the allied powers, were only fragments of their old territories. In European Turkey the Ottoman still held sway over their brethren — the Serb, the Bulgar, the Greek.

What is being witnessed to-day by the world in the re-entering into possession of their old lands by the Balkan Nations, is the final tearing up of the one-sided contract made by the Ottoman Turk for the Balkan Nations, when the Turks as conquerors overthrew them and imposed on them their rule. That war is the contest between sovereignties, the one legitimate, the other imposed by usurpation.

The idea of world peace has entered vividly into the conceptions and even into the militant movements of the present time. Many minds have thrilled with the question as to whether the human race may not have entered the age when the sword is to be fused into the ploughshare, and the lamb lie down in peace with the lion. It is hoped that war can be made rare or perchance with the evolution of a higher human nature, eliminated. The eyes of faith which look forward afar to that period of a higher level of humanity, behold, too, the ehmination of another kind of war, one intimately at the base of the armed strife between nations, namely the war between the " haves " and *' havenots," when starvation and the misery ofeconomic slavery shall have disappeared.

The matter of peace should be studied with scientific method. There must be examination of data and conclusions based as nearly as possible, if not on experiments, at least on human experience.

World peace as a practical achievement cannot be approached in our day by robbing peoples of the conceptions of self-defence, but by the establishment of equilibrium between the interests of nations and the calming and eradication of storm-centres. In this way Germany and

Italy for example, which, for hundreds of years as weak and dismembered communities, were the battle-fields of Europe, have within the space of a single generation, through their unification, become powerful States, and within their boundaries the old weak and disrupted conditions, representing a kind of moral vacuum, drawing to themselves the inrushing expansive forces of their ambitious and stronger neighbours, have disappeared, so making serenity in a centre where storms were wont to gather. Conditions similar in that regard to those which existed in Italy and Germany prior to their unification as well as others peculiar to Turkish misrule have long existed in the Balkan Peninsula, making that part of the world a centre of continual disturbance and therefore dangerous to general peace. The unification and confederation of the several peoples of the Balkans in a free and independent formation will eradicate the causes of disturbance in that centre. On page 728 of the second volume of " The Servian People, Their Past Glories, and Their Destiny," ^ published two years prior to the present war, occur the following words : " All the lessons to be drawn from history would indicate to ordinary political sagacity that in the unification of each of the Balkan races, lies the solution of the Near Eastern Question. The unification of the Serbs, the Bulgars, the Roumanians, and Greeks into homogeneous entities would be the most potent factor in any approach to intelligent co-operation for individual defence and development."

The vital result of the present war, Important thereby to the world as a peace factor, Is precisely that unification of the several Balkan States: — The Serbs and Montenegrins liberating from Turkish occupation their old lands and unifying with their co-natlonals who form the population

1 The Servian People, Their Past Glories and Their Destiny, by Prince and Princess Lazarovich- Hrebelianovich, New York, Ch. Scribner & Sons; London, V^erner Laurie.

lO of those lands, the Bulgarians, doing the same in adjacent territories inhabited by Bulgars, and the Greeks, re-acquiring old Greek inhabited lands. So their leaguing together permanently for common economic interests and foreign relations becomes possible for the first time in modern days and constitutes a new Balkan Power strong enough to defend the territorial integrity and the national interests of each and all.

A live man must fight in this world, whether in actual bloody warfare in defence of his home-land, or personally in battle against adverse circumstances, or again in the service of an ideal. When battle shall no longer be attended by spilled lives on blood-stained fields, the clash of ideas and vital life-forces will continue a warfare in the human attempt to try out the value of such forces and assert supremacies in the region of the intellect. Strife is the primordial law of nature; we must

II look that fact squarely in the face; the principle governs all forms of creation, from the lowest up to the highest, — the struggle to survive, the struggle to win ever higher and to keep what has been won, to hold that which is conquered and possessed. The struggle for survival, the struggle for existence, cannot be eradicated by man-made disciplinary laws, but only by a series of conditions, by the creation or modification of conditions. It is the misery born of this struggle of existence which socialism and its theories attempt to remedy. So, also the various peace and arbitration plans seek to remedy the conditions of intercourse between the nations. Both sets of theories have hitherto brought but lame advance. Though both are imbued with the highest and sublimest of ideals, they assume that man-made law can stem the course of nature, and both in their methods have hitherto largely ignored the basic laws of nature underlying that contest. As there are means to create conditions in a community to make the struggle for existence easier for the individual, and to find those means the antecedents of the individual are studied to discover if heredity has not placed a handicap on him, while his domestic life, his needs and his opportunities form the subjects of investigation, so, too, the same principles apply to the study of nations. It is their home conditions, the conditions within themselves and their needs, or their Imagined needs — their greeds, which bring about strife.

Supported by history It can be said In general, that all wars between nations, all civil upheavals, all mighty social violences of whatever nature, have had at base whether apparent or obscure, an economical grievance, or a commercial ambition. Back even of the so-called religious wars were causes partaking largely of the same character.

At the base of every real revolution is a loaf of bread, and commerce is a latent state of war.

The methods of commerce inextricably bound up to-day with the foreign policies of nations, are by reason of competition in all its factors, essentially combative. Military action therefore may be but an extension, a consequence, not the breach but the continuity, of those methods. Investigation shows that whenever two nations go to war they have been for decades or perhaps centuries advancing on lines of interest which are convergent. If for some reason this clash of interests becomes vital, a matter of life or death, the struggle of survival enters, war becomes cheaper than peace for one or the other of the two. The elements which determine the question of the struggle for survival, lie at home, in the facts conditioning the livelihood of the members of the nation.

Communities or nations in their different stages of youth, manhood and decay seem to follow the ebb and flow of periods similar to those of individual human life, and the cycle of their years includes within its rhythm, times of weakness and illness as well as epochs of health and mastery, a constructive age and the hour of dissolution ; and the nature of what was builded proclaims the measure of a race's immortality. So it seems to have been from time immemorial as witnessed eloquently by " the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome," by the moral conquests of certain civilisations asserting for human dignity, and by the silent monuments and remains of the old buried cities of races long forgotten, recounting their shattered dreams to the archeologlst who digs up their broken columns and arches in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. The stories told by the Egyptian priests to Solon, retold by Plato, echo the same ancient tale.

As the scientific study of the economics of life lead to finding means to ease the struggle for life of the individual, so a scientific study of the underlying real causes of war must lead to the knowledge of laws which nature has laid down for the intercourse of nations, and so perhaps means will be discovered which will make war a thing of extreme rarity.

It has been well ascertained that the basic condition essential to the development of individuals is liberty. The same Is true of races, and only when a State is the expression of the entity and totality of one nation, capable of formulating the genius of that nation, can it guarantee true liberty to Its citizens, and progress on a sound basis. Such a basis alone, can provide for the moral and material needs of the community, establishing a trustworthy equilibrium between desire and the power of attainment, therefore possessing the confidence of the citizens.

Working agreements providing guarantees of enduring International peace are possible between such States.

i6

Should there rise to mind cases of a State composed of individuals representing a wide diversity of races as in the United States, it must also be admitted that only when such individuals, as a result of the melting-pot process, or of their own free will, accept for their own a common national ideal, can the State hope for stability or clearness of expression. That process of absorption and assimilation has been found possible concerning individuals in immigration, but not when attempted in regard to large masses of different races, especially when they form the homogeneous population of whole provinces which have been forcibly wrenched from a neighbouring national State.

The impulse of communities of the same race to unify themselves into one State is the simple tendency towards intelligent formulation found in all nature, and is a highly moral act in the interest of national eugenics.

The completing of a national State to

Include all the members of its race is a necessary and constructive step towards the attainment of world-peace on a righteous foundation.

The subject under discussion is not the possibility of abolishing war but the examination of the International problems from which war might conceivably arise.

The geographical features of the earth, the configuration of the continents, the distribution of land and sea, the cllmateric conditions and their influences on the growth of plant and animal life, the riches of the soil, the mineral wealth of the sub-soil, are the primordial factors to determine or influence the life and development of a people. To those must be added the facilities for communications and the Interchange of the necessities or luxuries of life, as well as the genius or mentality Inherent In a people, that Is, Its balance or equilibrium of mind which finds

i8 expression in its political and social development, its thought, its religious life, its soul-life. All those factors have to be taken into account in studying the future or a nation or race and their consideration is necessary to an understanding of its present, and indicate regions In both the material and moral spheres, where the interests of that nation become vital.

The geographical configuration of the earth's surface has driven staves, so to speak, to mark points where the interests of nations shall clash, where the " cockpits " of that clash shall be. Certain points of the earth's surface are by their situation, regions where the Interests of two or more nations come into conflict, and whose possession confers dominant importance. Those points and zones form the natural storm-centres of the world.

Napoleon said: ''War Is a business of positions," and the military value of positions fix the geographical situation of the international problems which are of world

Importance and which link up all of the great interests of all the great powers and interweave them Into one pattern; and no one of these great international problems can be solved or even modified without affecting In some point or other the status of the other problems.

The first necessity of the economic development of a community is the means of Intercourse or communication with other communities. The raw material required for Its Industries If not for food Itself, must often come from afar; the surplus of production must find an outer market; the livelihood of the community might depend on the sale of Its manufactured products, and modern Industrialism has imposed that need on many nations. The roads to such markets must be safe and secure, the competitive power of other nations must be met, and as commerce is never so secure and untrammeled as under Its own flag, the roads leading to those necessary markets or even those markets themselves must be controlled. The vital principle of this control demands political supremacy, which in turn depends upon a strong military land and sea power able to occupy and hold the strategic points commanding such roads and markets, or to dominate such lands or peoples considered as desirable markets.

Over-production of human material, calling for new territory whereupon to settle over-flow of population, causes an expansion, under the inavoidable Impulse of nature, operated in migrations of peoples or the more deliberate form of colonisation.

The Japanese author, Statesman and Privy Councillor, Baron Kaneko, says: " In the twentieth century It is the Increase and expansion of International commerce that guides the policies of nations." — He says further: — "All nations are looking for new markets for their Industries, and the only market now remaining which can be exploited with benefit is the continent of Asia."

Looking at the world's map and bearing in mind that water, whether by ocean, lake or river, affords the cheapest means of commercial intercourse, the shortest and cheapest routes from the great industrial centres of Europe and America, to the markets of Asia, are seen to lie through the two artificial passages connecting the oceans, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. The two mighty nerve-ganglia of the world political problems of to-day, lie, one in the eastern Mediterranean, one in the Caribbean Sea ; both positions command a narrow canal, and are vast lanes of the world's commerce. The eastern Mediterranean to-day, and the Caribbean to-morrow, must necessarily be the centres around which the interests and the attention of the world must revolve.

A third situation of straits of future significance and potentiality lies in the East Indian Archipelago between Australia and the southeastern Asia, forming a kind of sea-divide between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

The Suez Canal is not only the important eastern gate of the Mediterranean, of which Gibraltar is the door to the west, Malta, the watch-tower of the centre, the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, the entranceways to the Black Sea washing the shores of Russia, but the Suez Canal is the centre of a region Including the Balkans in the north, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea in the east, and Aden, closing the Red Sea, in the south, where are grouped a number of positions of military, therefore political value, which based one upon another control Southeastern Europe, and open thence a gate northward on one side, and on the other, dominate southern Asia, India and its ocean.

That region towards which for the past one hundred years has been more and more closely converging the interests of all western nations, has been in its main problems, the core of what is known as the Orient Question. The Orient Question whether under the guise of Turkish, Armenian, Egyptian, or Persian, has always in reality, been the one titanic contest of England with Russia, England striving ever in defence of India.

The naval base, Gibraltar, doorkeeper of the Mediterranean was acquired by England In the early eighteenth century when she fought France for supremacy in the Atlantic. The Cape of Good Hope was acquired during the French revolution and British guard placed at that naval base to watch the passage from the Atlantic eastward to the Indian Ocean. When Napoleon pointed a way to India across Egypt, England acquired Malta, as a strong naval base and point of warning midway In the Mediterranean, and at the southern extremity of the Red Sea at the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, England erected the fortress of Aden. With the piercing

MAP OF THE WORLD of Suez she acquired Cyprus and the control of Egypt.

The great positions of military and political value in that part of the world are : Egypt, dominating Suez and the Red Sea ; In the Balkan Peninsula: Constantinople, (Dardanelles, Bosphorus), Salonika and the Servian Plateau comprising the Basin of Nish — the point of junction of the great natural highways of the Balkan Peninsula. Of supreme Importance is the possession of the Servian Plateau, opening the door to Europe northward, and the roads southward to Salonika, and eastward to Constantinople. The possession of the Servian Plateau for which the Turks had fought the Servians for 150 years, allowed them in the year 1526 with the single battle of Mohacs to become the masters of Hungary and within a few short weeks to stand at the gates of Vienna. It was the possession of the Servian Plateau which made it possible for the Balkan allies in the present war to so swiftly and completely clear their old lands from the Turks. It is the conquest of the Servian plateau which is the object of the relentless intrigues of Austria making pretext of Albania in the present crisis.

Again looking across the Bosphorus towards the Orient the situation of Constantinople (Bosphorus, Dardanelles) forms the apex of a triangle of positions, including the Armenian Plateau and Adana commanding the passes across the Taurus and Anti-Taurus. Supreme in Importance of these is the Armenian Plateau. That region commands the land-ways opening southward to the Gulf of Alexandretta through Syria to Suez, and the two long road-ways, one eastward across Persia to Herat and beyond through Afghanistan, the other, by the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris toward the Persian Gulf, giving access to southern Persia, southern Afghanistan, and Baluchistan towards India. To those antique roads came Alexander the Great from Macedonia, and along them he carried his triumphs up to the foot of the Pamirs to the springs of the Tarim, where his empire touched China. He reached Merv, called of old " Antiochia Margltana," and Herat, called " Alexandria of Aria." By the long south wayhe passed Babylon, the Persian Gulf, Susa, and Persepolis. From Alexandretta in Syria he marched down to Egypt. In modern times as in the day of the great Macedonian, the Armenian Plateau still commands the way to Persia, to India and to Egypt. As the Armenian Plateau lies under the shadow of the Russian hand, so too, in the eastern Mediterranean, Adana and the Gulf of Alexandretta,^ lie

1 It is interesting to note that the river Orontes emptying into the Gulf of Alexandretta, is at a certain part of its course parallel with the Euphrates, low ridges only separating the two rivers and the distance of division between them measuring only about 50 miles. That situation was picturesquely illustrated by the English Colonel Chesney in 1834 who steered two Steamboats named Tigris and Euphrates up the Orontes river thence had them carried across the dividing ridges and floated on the river Euphrates which they well under the guns of the British naval base of Cyprus.

As the Suez Canal gave to the Mediterranean a new importance, so the Panama Canal bestows upon the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico an importance beyond any they hitherto possessed. The Panama Canal not only provides a shortened lane for the world's commerce across the oceans, with value not to be computed in the development of the western coasts of both Americas, but again suggestive of analogy with Suez, Panama will be a new point where East and West shall meet. That transection of the thin thread of land by which nature had joined the two vast Americas, considered locally, severs and at the same time brings Into closer communion two types of civilisation, the Anglo-Saxon In the north, the HIspano-Latin In the

navigated down to the Persian Gulf. The Colonel's enterprise suggested another possible waterway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

south. As the Mediterranean from of old was the mother of civilisation in that part of the Eastern Hemisphere, so in the west the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, two sister basins enclosed within coast-lines of North, Central and South America on three sides, and by their interlocking chains of islands on the fourth, stretching from Trinidad to Key West, a barrier of protection to inhibit or control the passage of their waters by fleets seeking course from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so too, those twin seas like their elder sister of Europe are destined to become the progenltrices and guardians of new and mighty civilisations. From those islands, of the West Indies, forming the first discovery of western lands, the Spaniards carried their conquests to the ajacent continents, and already, at first sight as it were, the mingling of the waters of the two mighty oceans was proposed by the men who first stood and gazed afar with both Atlantic and Pacific at their feet.

First the Dutch, then the French and then the English, came and fought with the Spaniard for a share of his amazing discoveries, then battled among themselves. From those days of the Buccaneers and the Spainsh Main, and contest for supremacy on the Atlantic, England emerged with Trinidad, Jamaica, British Honduras (on the mainland), connected by intervening isles in an almost continuous chain from Honduras to the mouth of the Orinoco, and stretching far northward and eastward with the Bahamas and Bermuda into the Atlantic. The Dutch still retain Curagao, the French^ some of the Antilles. The last of the Spanish heirs was the United States, receiving Puerto Rico with vested interests in Cuba.

The island positions, commanding the canal and forming its natural defences on the Atlantic side are: the natural island fortresses of Jamaica and Curagao, and Cuba derives its importance from its proximity to Florida. Still another point in the Caribbean of potential value as naval base, lies in Santo Domingo or possibly in St. Thomas. In the Pacific Ocean the defences of the Panama Canal are in the position of the Galapagos Islands and the Hawaii.

Midway of the seas between Suez and Panama, dividing the Indian Ocean from the Pacific, the East Indian Archipelago lies like a broken bridge between Australia and the southeastern coast of Asia. The Straits of Singapore and the narrow passages between the Isles command the approaches from the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Chinese coast. The position of first military value is occupied by the Philippine Islands, dominating the passages of the Straits, the Chinese Sea and coast-line. The important naval bases of the region are in the hands of the Dutch, of the English, keeping watch over the tracks to India, and of the Americans with the Philippines as advance-post to the Chinese markets. The islands of the Archipelago are rapidly becoming the centre of interest far in excess of any they have hitherto possessed and the mouth of the Shelde and Rhine in Europe may some day hold for them a word of destiny. The advent of Japan has already enhanced their significance as their possession would give to that Power complete control of Eastern Asia and a supremacy in that part of the world which could not be challenged by any nation or combination of nations.