Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/328

 a cessation of military operations and for the evacuation of certain Turkish territories.[43] Then came the long, bitter struggle against the Greeks, terminating with the Mudania armistice of October 10, 1922, which assured to the Turks the return of Smyrna and portions of Thrace. On November 1, the Sultanate was abolished, and Turkey became a republic. Four days later the Turkish Nationalists entered Constantinople in triumph. The struggle for the territorial and administrative integrity of a New Turkey seemed to be won.

The victory of the Nationalists scrapped the Treaty of Sèvres and called for a complete readjustment of the Near Eastern situation. When the first Lausanne Conference for Peace in the Near East assembled on November 20, 1922, there were high hopes that a just and lasting settlement might be arrived at. The conference was only a few days old, however, when the time-honored obstacles to peace in the Levant made their appearance: the rival diplomatic policies of the Great Powers; the desire of the West, by means of the Capitulations, to maintain a firm hold upon its vested interests in the East; the imperialistic struggle of rival concessionaires, supported by their respective governments, for possession of the raw materials, the markets, and the communications of Asiatic Turkey. Once more the Bagdad Railway, with its tributary lines in Anatolia and Syria, became one of the stakes of diplomacy!

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES*