Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/246

 refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek fait accompli across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907 Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both Turkey and Russia.

The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war, both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions, one of which is that the "maximum force which any one Power may send through the