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between the European and the Asiatic races might be upset to our disadvantage.

'This possibility,' comments Signor Spagnolo, 'renders the responsibility of Germany still more great and more terrible for having impelled a whole race and a whole civilisation to such a formidable attrition of their own strength, just at the moment when that race and that civilisation had need of their most fertile vigour, if they did not wish to be condemned to that state of immobility which is the origin of national decadence.'

Twenty-seven years ago, Prof. C. H. Pearson, in his book on National Life and Character,' made a forecast of the world-future which it is well to bear in mind.

'The day will come (he wrote), and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the European; when Chinamen and the nations of Hindustan, the States of Central and South America, by that time predominantly Indian, and it may be African nations of the Congo and the Zambesi, under a dominant caste of foreign rulers, are represented by fleets in the European seas; invited to international conferences, and welcomed as allies in the quarrels of the civilised world. . . .

'It is idle to say that, if all this should come to pass, our pride of place will not be humiliated. We have been struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan races and to the Christian faith, to the letters and arts and charm of social manners which we have inherited from the best times of the past. We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be, that the changes have been inevitable. It has been our work to organise and create, to carry peace and law and order over the world, that others may enter in and enjoy.'

Art. 11.-PRESENT DISCONTENTS IN THE NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST.

HUSEIN, king of Hejaz, whose sincere belief in the identity of Arab and British interests does not preclude him from criticising British statesmanship now and then, pulled up short in a conversation with our representative at Jiddah in 1917. You speak to me continually,' said he, 'of the British Government and British Policy. But I see five Governments where you see one, and the same number of policies. There is a policy, first, of your Foreign Office; second, of your Army; third, of your Navy; fourth, of your Protectorate in Egypt; fifth, of your Government in India. Each of these British Governments seems to me to act upon an Arab policy of its own. What are the Arabs to do now, and what are they to expect of you after the War?' The old man was right enough at the moment from his own point of view. His people were being dealt with by several British authorities on several divergent lines. But his analysis ignored distinction of genus and species. Four of the Governments of his classification had enough community of idea to form essentially one genus; and their differences of expression were due in the main to accidents of war-to imperfect co-ordination and control following on difficulties of communication, departmental overpressure, and temporary failures of single direction. But the fifth, the Government of India, for all practical purposes in relation to the Near and Middle East, functioned as a genus apart.

This generic distinction is primarily responsible for our actual situation in the Arab countries. In a secondary degree the distinction of species within the first genusHome Government-has contributed to bring it about. There are also independent causes, possibly more blameworthy; and behind all, of course, stands a first cause, the responsibility for which need not be discussed herethe entry of the Ottoman Empire into war against us and our Allies. This last made it incumbent upon us to operate in and through the Arab peoples in such a way that, if successful, we must destroy in the process all general government of them, and be faced with the obligation to construct a fresh government. Obvious as

this sentence must sound now, it is not superfluous to utter any part of it. When Turkey threw in her lot with the Central Powers in 1914, she created a danger to our power hardly less grave than that created by the German invasion of Belgium and France-one so grave, indeed, and patent that many have said, with some exaggeration perhaps, that from that moment our war was for the control of Constantinople and the East.

Involved inextricably, as we were, in Egypt, India and the way between, the great block of Arab territories, which fill all the south-west of Asia, became at once the vital area of our defence. We might indeed strike at the head of Ottoman power, that is at Constantinople itself, through Turkish-speaking territories-though we must remember that, since in 1914 the attitude of neither Greece nor Bulgaria was sufficiently defined to open a way through the Balkans, such an attack could start only from the region of the Dardanelles-but our defence was in the Arab-speaking provinces. And, if our military policy there was to be offensive-defensive, the operations, if they were to reach vital points of the enemy's defence, must be pushed so far forward that the liberation, disintegration and reorganisation of the majority of the Arab subjects of Turkey would be imposed on us as an inevitable consequence.

The inevitable was recognised and accepted in the original plan of British action. Our Eastern Empire was to be defended by two correlated offensives, conducted upon both flanks of the Arab provinces of Turkey, i.e. in Syria-Arabia and in Mesopotamia. But geographical conditions dictated a difference of offensive methods. On the west, i.e. in Syria and Arabia, we could -or our strategic authorities thought we could-throw a force directly on the northern fringe of the Arabs, into immediate contact with the Turkish home-land in Asia Minor, and cut the one from the other. Consequent operations would be conducted mainly by the Arabs themselves, rising against the isolated enemy garrisons, until, by success, a clean sweep should be made of Turks, Turkish government and Turko-German influence. Thus, Arab co-operation was to be an essential factor-the most essential-from the first; and the Syrian people was to take so large a part in working out its own

salvation that an Arab autonomy, which we could recognise, might be expected to come into being without any considerable stage of British occupation, and without the obligations or the difficulties of subsequent withdrawal which that would entail. On this side, then, a policy of Arabia for the Arabs promised such speedy realisation that its ideal inspired the plan first conceived and remained the principle of all subsequent plans.

On the eastern side, however-in Mesopotamia-access to the Ottomanised-Arab area could be gained only through its southern fringe. The Turkish occupation would have to be forced inland by British arms, and British occupation must replace it step by step until the former should be driven out of the Arab provinces altogether a consummation likely to be delayed in any case by the traditional stubbornness of the enemy, and not to be fully achieved in reasonable time unless quick success ensued in the west. In the east, therefore, since British military action not only was to be the primary means, but must continue to be the only effective means for an indefinite period, the guiding principle of the western plan-Arabia for the Arabs-did not assume the same insistent importance. Nor could it have done so, even had it inspired equally those who had to give first effect to the eastern scheme of operations. But, as the sequel was to show quickly, it did not inspire them at all; or, at the best, it was accepted by them with such reservations and modified so greatly by contamination with another principle, that it could exert little or no immediate influence on action. Thus, to put it plainly, we started on a common plan of defending our Eastern Empire against Germanophil Turkey by liberation of the Arabs, with two distinct ideals of their future relation to ourselves: on the west, we looked to make them independent allies; on the east, obedient subjects.

This initial inconsistency of ideals has never been harmonised; and some mutual contamination of one ideal by the other has only increased the detrimental effect of the dualism on a single race, which had, and has, one, and only one common desire-to be freed from all government but its own, which it expects to be the minimum of all government whatever. Read the history of the Arabs since the birth of their Prophet, and you will find

that desire its single key. Good, bad or indifferent, the alien has ever been to them equally alien. They have accepted one alien in order to expel another, and a third to expel the second; but they have neither desired nor acquiesced in the rule of any. What gifts of wealth or civilised appliances or peace their liberators may bring leave them fundamentally cold. Aliens may be as far apart in capacity for, and practice of, administration as the Turk and the Briton, but the heart of the Arab remains as aloof from the last as from the first.

A British administrator of India can hardly see himself as the Arabs see him. He would have little heart in his work if he did. He is the Protector of the Poor, and his view is apt to be bounded by the material well-being of those he protects. So long as he is spending the best of his bodily and mental vigour on his people, he feels no need to justify his own superior position, being, by force of tradition, training and function, an Imperial Whig. He is the Father, they are the Children. He labours, fights and dies for them, grateful or ungrateful, because he never doubts that both his authority and his obligations are as well founded on the nature of things as a father's on the nature of man. In the particular he assumes the universal. The British raj is the best form of human government; and the best government makes for the happiness of the greatest number. Therefore to fail to impose it wherever possible is to fail in one's duty to mankind.

Our Eastern offensive-that in Mesopotamia-as every one knows, was originally organised, manned and directed, by the Government of India. Starting before the other, our Mesopotamian force was sent up the Gulf inspired by British-Indian policy and British-Indian administrative ideals. It went whole-heartedly to seize a long-desired opportunity of confirming British-Indian power in the Gulf and securing, for the advantage of India, possible railheads and actual navigable waterways in lower Iraq; less than half-heartedly to accomplish anything which, though of advantage to the Empire in general, might be to the disadvantage of India in particular; not at all to call Arabs to freedom and help them to that end. Our authorities in India, civilian and

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