Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/44

 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country.

To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.

But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful stewardship of that law. It had come to a