OCR Text |
Show U. S. AND TURKEY. Those who advocated a declaration of a state of war between the United : States and Turkey aro beginning to see the light. The Turks, generally speaking, speak-ing, aro unwilling vassals of the ally who has eclipsed them in the arts of fright fulness, and it is quite within the range of probability that they soon i will seek a separate peace. Meantime it would be unwise to jeopardize American Amer-ican interests and lives in the narrowing narrow-ing realm of tho sultan. Moreover, tho British seem to be handling tho Turkish situation satisfactorily. satis-factorily. They have conquered virtually vir-tually all of Mesopotamia; they have removed the tnenaco to the Suez canal and are making their way northward through Palestine, having wrested Jerusalem Je-rusalem from the killing grip of a race that degenerated long ago in all the aits and science of a living civilization. civiliza-tion. It is well to let. well enough alone iu Turkey for the present. The British victories have had a moral effect difficult dif-ficult to exaggerate. The holy cities of the Moslems have slipped one by one from their grasp and tho inhabi- j tants of that part of the world, Christian, Chris-tian, .lew aud Moslem, will not fail to see in these events the hand of God and the beginning of a new order. j At the outset the Turkish govern- j ment tried to proclaim a holy war through its control of the high priests of Mohammedanism, but the Arabs of the Asiatic empire of the sultan and millions of the folds of islam throughout through-out the British and French dominions refused to bow to the decree of the Turk that an authentic holy war existed. ex-isted. Aud now these millions will have reason to regard the war as cursed. Already the Arabs, under the king of llejaz, have been in rebellion against the Turk these two years, assisting as-sisting the British wherever possible. It is not too much to hope that the inevitable collapse of Turkey is not tar distant either that or separate peace. We should not suppose that the Turks, having entered the war for profit, would stand by an ally no longer long-er able to bring them profit. When they see the Germanic power unable to render them sufficient aid to halt the invaders they will want to come to t erms with the invaders. And more than likely the spirit of revolt in Turkey Tur-key will grow apace, the nearer General Gen-eral Allenby gets to the heart of Asia Minor. |