Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/167

 the remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these three programs by the standards of practicability which are customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom, damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.

To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed. Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The Rûm and Ermeni communities had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by 1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old religious, to a new territorial, basis.