Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/64

 Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together. It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.

Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run. Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem, but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were most of the Armenians.

Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom, snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around