Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/24

 the Reichstadt concession. It brought about an acute conflict with Russia, and this diplomatic defeat of Russia at the hand of German bluff in 1909, served as an antecedent to the German policy of 1914. Thus, people who insist upon the fact that there must be a direct connection, as cause and effect, between these events of 1907–1909 and the present war are right, I suppose. The war might have begun from various causes and on many pretexts on the part of Germany, but, as a matter of fact, it began by reason of the Eastern Question being reopened, and we cannot understand the present situation in the Balkans unless we discuss the Eastern Question in full.

Coming to this part of my lecture, I find a very good definition of what the Eastern Question properly is, in its European shape, in the initial phrase of Mr Miller's book on the Ottoman Empire. He says: "The near Eastern Question may be defined as the problem of filling up the vacuum created by the gradual disappearance of the Turkish Empire from Europe." "Filling up the vacuum." I agree with this definition, but with one correction, and a very serious one. There is no vacuum, no emptiness, not only in the world of physical things but also in the world of morals. As long as there were no moral entities—by which I mean no nations conscious of themselves—as long as there were no moral entities in the world of the enslaved rayáh in Turkey, there was also no vacuum. Accordingly, there was also no dislocation of Turkey, although the symptoms of decrepitude and of coming decay were already present and numerous. The process of decomposition developed as the consequence of a new