HELLAS and NREDEEMED HELLENISM The Policy of Victory in the East and Its Results by GEORGES BOURDON Smyrna, a Greek City by CHARLES VELLAY Hellenism in Asia Minor in the Middle Ages by CHARLES DIEHL Translated from the French by CARROLL N. BROWN, Ph.D. The College of the City of New York 1920 Published by the AIMERICAN-HELLENIC SOCIETY, Inc. Columbia University Post OflSce, Substation No. 84, New York, N. Y Ponograph OBJECTS OF THE SOCIETY The American-Hellenic Society of New York, Inc., is organized for the general purpose of ex- tending and encouraging among the citizens of the United States of America an interest in the cul- tural, political and economic relations between the United States and Greece; and in particular to promote educational relationships, including the estabhshment of exchange professorships in the Universities of the United States and Greece, as a means to diffuse knowledge of the literature and political institutions of the United States throughout Greece, and to encourage in America the study of the ancient and modern Hellenic language and literature; and further to make known the just claims of Greece in particular and of Hellenism in general. HELLAS and UNREDEEMED HELLENISM The Policy of Victory in the East and Its Results by GEORGES BOURDON Smyrna, a Greek City by CHARLES VELLAY Hellenism in Asia Minor in the Middle Ages by CHARLES DIEHL Translated from the French by CARROLL N. BROWN, Ph.D. The College of the City of New York 1920 Published by the AMERICAN-HELLENIC SOCIETY, Inc. Columbia University Post Office, Substation No. 84, New York, N. Y. Society :a\i H 1920 THE POLICY OF VICTORY IN THE EAST AND ITS RESULTS. By Georges Bourdon* If I am here to address you today, it is not because I have been asked to do so. It is I who have desired, speaking quite independently and on my own responsibihty, to inform French pubhc opinion of deeds and misdeeds, about the scandalous nature of which it entertains not the slightest suspicion. You will have no difficulty in believing me if I tell you that I am not, in any sense, yielding to a feeling of vanity. In the solemn feeling of expectancy in which the world is living at present, it would be a criminal act to make imprudent suggestions, and we should feel only scorn for a bad citizen who was capable of raising his voice for causes foreign to the interests of France and the future of peace. Having recently returned from a long journey which took me successively to Greece, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Thrace, Bulgaria and Macedonia, I feel that I am fulfilling a real duty in bearing testimony publicly to what I have heard and seen, and in pointing out the dangers into which a blind policy and egoistic interests threaten to precipitate a glorious and at the same time terrible victory. The most elementary notions are there jumbled together and opposing ideas are closely dovetailed. I arrived in the Orient with what I believed to be simple and in no way original views. Right soon I was made to see to what a degree these views were superficial. You probably cling to the archaic idea that community of peril creates community of interest and that the peoples that were in the league against death still maintain this feeling of solidarity in time of safety. You will find in the East plenty of people who are knowing enough to smile at your ingenuousness. It is the refinement of finesse *This article is a translation of an address entitled, Ce qu'est devenue en Orient la politique de la victoire, delivered in Paris on June 11, 1919, before the Ligue de l'Enseignement, under the auspices of the Ligue "Droit et Liberté." 1 2 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM to be the friend of one's enemy, the adversary of one's ally; to ahgn yourself with him who has raised his knife to smite you, as against him who helped you to escape the thrust. That seems to be the way that a man, in civil as well as military life, as a government official or a private citizen, in business as well as in politics, succeeds in making history. It is likewise by this manner of procedure that people rebuff goodwill, spoil friendship, compromise their credit, feed fanaticism, revive the arrogance and covetousness of the vanquished and over the corpse of baffled justice plant the seeds for future conflicts. In this topsy-turvy world, we come at every step on furrows where cynical or foolish hands are casting, with reckless pro- fusion and with peremptory gestures, the pestilential germs from which new carnage will tomorrow arise, unless this stupid desire is checked. Downright lies are mingled with sophistry, and the coalition of right which brought us victory is broken down by the coalition of egotism, and a whole crowd of in- capables, who call themselves realists, are as a matter of fact only the marionettes of a troop of profiteers who call them- selves patriots. I shall be obliged to speak of our allies and in particular of our friends the Italians. I will do this with frankness, guard- ing against all charge of ambiguity, I am one of those who, though regretting it, can find explanations for the wrecking of that beautiful ship, which ever since Aug. 2, 1914 has borne the Sacred Union of all the French, but I am also one who, neither for today nor for tomorrow, can accept the hypothesis that the Sacred Union of the Allies, of all the allies, small and great, can be repudiated. Together we went into battle, to the sacrifice, and to the victory; together, with hands clasped and hearts united, we must advance over our future paths, only anxious to remove pernicious obstacles and to call to our side, when the time comes, both the spectators of the combat and the adversaries who have there opposed us. Between our aUies of yesterday and our friends of tomorrow we have, however, the right to reserve privileged places to some; with a sincere heart we have given Italy her place. We have a common origin and our languages have a common source; our interests, along many lines, coincide, and can be mutually helpful; nowhere are they contradictory; our tem- HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 3 peraments are to a certian degree identical; we form the Latin family, and if it is necessary for the sake of common harmony that there be a balancing of influences and races, it is upon Italy and ourselves that the duty devolves, in the civihzation of tomorrow, to sound the rallying call of the Latin races, unless we wish this world to become a purely Anglo-Saxon world. France and Italy, united, will assure peace in the Mediterranean, and peace in the Mediterranean is a condition prerequisite to European peace. This said, we demand from Italy that she consent with good grace to make the same sacrifices for the common good that we have been content to make, and not to render too diflScult the task of the friends who have sincerely helped in our task. In the very midst of war, when our armies in the Orient were most grievously menaced, Italy did her best to perpetuate Greek anarchy, to save to the pro-German Constantine his dishonest throne, to discredit by the basest calumnies the great Cretan Venizelos, and to bring to naught the work of reparation of the Provisional Government at Salonika. It was certainly not in the interest of our coalition that this regrettable policy came to the fore. It is now ancient history; let us not dwell upon it. And yet it was only yesterday that brilliant speeches and numerous articles in the Italian press were launched against us with furious invectives. The organ of Mr. Giolitti, La Stampa, permitted itself to describe the German disaster as a political catastrophe for Italy, and denounced the 'extreme harshness' of the peace imposed on Germany 'by the well- known blind hatred of the French and the exaggeration of the sentiment of revenge'. Unjust and deplorable statements, which will fall with all their weight on those who utter them. We might disdain to notice them, if they were isolated expressions and did not give evidence of being part of a systematic plan. This systematic plan can best be caught in full action in the Orient. It is being spread openly — I am almost tempted to say officially. When the Italian policy is active in favor of Turks or Bulgarians, or against the Serbs or Greeks, it is always just barely within the bounds of the common policy. Every time that a measure of public order is required, or that some complaint appears necessary before Turkish or Bulgarian authorities, the Italian representatives participate with the 4 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM tips of their fingers, and merely for form's sake. Every time on the contrary, that these same authorities essay a resistance, they are sure to find an advocate in the Itahan as against the Frenchman, the EngHshman, or the Greek. In the thousand and one details of military occupation, the Italian officer takes the part of him whom it is really his duty to control. He has Httle or nothing to do with his English or French comrades, but in Bulgaria, he walks openly with the Bulgarian officers, and in Smyrna there is even a club in which a room is especially reserved for the daily meetings of Italian and Turkish officers. In Sofia the society dames organize teas in his honor, and on two occasions Greek and Serbian officers threatened to withdraw from the Interallied MiHtary Club if the Bulgarians were admitted, as the Italians had insistently demanded. At Smyrna the Italian authorities exerted them- selves through advertisements in the papers to bring about Italian naturaHzation among this interloping Levantine popu- lation which throngs the harbors of the Levant and which has never been so eagerly courted. There was there a commissioner named Manfredi, who made himself so obnoxious that, on the request of the French High Commissioner, he was recalled. We do not contest Italy's right to choose her friends, but until the peace is signed, when we find ourselves in the pres- ence of peoples who only yesterday were fighting against us and who will remain tomorrow the declared enemies of our best alhes, and when it is a matter of making governments, upon whom we have hard terms to impose, feel the threat of force — the only argument that amounts to anything to races that know only brutal domination or submission — we are certainly justi- fied in regretting that allied solidarity, before allowing itself to dissolve, should not await the final hour of settlement. If we add that this statement is made not without a feehng of profound disappointment, Italy will surely see in this not so much regret for aid lost as sorrow for a friendship compromised. Is it wounding her or is it rendering homage to her to make a cordial appeal to her loyalty and to invoke, in our mutual interest, the recollection of so many great hours in which a seal has been set upon Latin fraternity? In order to show, beyond any possibility of doubt, that such a poUcy brings heavy risks to peace, it is enough to see HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 5 the Turk and Bulgarian at work and to look into their thoughts. Do they regard themselves as conquered? Not in the least. The former, with that faculty for forgetting and submitting, which is a result of oriental fatalism, thinks no more of the bloody defeats in Mesopotamia, and will tell you that if he surrendered, it was because the fall of Bulgaria and Austria left him alone in the center of a coalition of enemies; his in- violate capital is for him the proof of a power that the Allies feared to affront. As to Bulgaria, the case is still better. It was the will of the people under arms which put an end to a war that was always unpopular. Mr. Theodoroff, President of the Council, told me this in the plainest of terms. It was necessary to conceal from this people, which had only feelings of tenderness for Russia and affection for France, the fact that they were taking up arms against the French and the Russians; having advanced victoriously through Macedonia, they at once informed the Government of Ferdinand and Radoslavoff that they would advance no further, and in fact, for a year, the army contented itself with holding the positions it had acquired; at the end of that time, war-wearied, it signified its desire for peace, threat- ening to turn and march upon Sofia. It was necessary to yield. "If we made peace," Mr. Theodoroff concluded, "it was in a feeling of confidence in your justice." In a question of justice, we all know that the Bulgarians are experts. How refuse justice, if not gratitude, to a people which turned its cannons away from our army, in order to threaten with them its own government.'* When a race, historically and psychologically trained to the cult of force, is freed from this burden, and when those who now wield power to the end that justice may be done, seem to spend their ingenuity in finding excuses to abdicate; when a conqueror, settled in the land of the conquered, appears to have no other thought than to make people forget that he is the conqueror, is it to be wondered at, that the conquered, cherishing the illusion that he still possesses the power, recurs to his old-time arrogance, and by cleverness, by bargaining, or, if need be, by deeds of violence, (which he may always dis- avow), tries to take advantage of the weakness of his conqueror, 6 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM in order to wrest back from him a part of what he lost at one blow? This is exactly what one sees in Bulgaria. The country is sprinkled with little Italian posts and you can imagine that their control is not very exacting. But by a singular failure to understand military necessities, the terms of the armistice neglected to impose there a state of siege, and also committed the mistake of leaving the direction of the railroads in the hands of the Bulgarians, in such a way that the Bulgarians are masters of all the means of transportation. At Sofia an Interallied staff is located, with French, English, Italian, Greek and Serbian sections, at the head of which is the French general Chrétien, the supreme representative of the Allies and acting under General Franchet d'Espérey, Com- mander-in-Chief at Constantinople of the Armies of the East. Bulgarian officers are everywhere to be seen, promenading with head high in air, with arrogant looks, tightly belted and stiff figures, uniformed like Russians but bearing themselves like Prussians. Are these the conquered, — these military men, who, parading along the sidewalks, yield not an inch.^ How absurd ! The people remember having seen a division of prison- ers, liberated by General Franchet d'Espérey, pass under arches of triumph, in the midst of popular acclamations saluting the victors. Many of them were without doubt such; they have journals, to which our military censor is more kind than to our own, which let them understand every morning that it was only with their permission that the Allies entered. They, as well as their soldiers, salute neither the French nor the English, to say nothing of the Greeks and Serbs, who are anathema to them, and whom on occasion they insult right in the street. Salutes are only offered by the Bulgarian soldiers to the Italian officers. Nay, it often happens that Bulgarians publicly arrest French soldiers. There was a captain of our staff who, when insolently accosted by a Bulgarian com- mandant, insisted on receiving from him the salute that the simple soldiers systematically refuse to our officers. On another occasion a Bulgarian officer and one of our privates met, face to face, in a footpath in the snow. "Don't you see that I am a Bulgarian officer, " said the first stiffly. "And I," said the poilu, looking him s^quare in the face, "am a French HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 7 soldier." And it was the Bulgarian who had to step aside. Our soldiers were as a general rule known for their amiability, but this man, by his proud reply, avenged the humiliation of his chiefs. In vain did General Chrétien, on more than one occasion, issue his orders. An order that is deprived of sanc- tion, is little better than a circular note. Refusing to salute is the external evidence of the lack of respect which the Bulgarian feels towards his conqueror. How could it be otherwise? At a time when he ought to have been made to submit to aVithority, does he not see that it is really a question of sparing him — dealing gently with him — and of pleading extenuating circumstances for him? When the Bulgarian ministers in the hope of rescuing from the shipwreck all that can be saved, testify that the Bulgarian nation was dragged into the war in spite of itself, and that in a choice between Germany and France the deeper sentiment of the people has never hesitated, our friends are all too ready to fall into the trap; and if by a singular abuse of terms, they dare to claim 'justice' for their country, I have seen even those of our representatives that were best qualified to judge, proudly sitting up a little straighter and asking scrupulously whether the Bulgarians may not possibly be right. I shall be the very last, beheve me, to dispute his right with even the fiercest of our enemies; but if we do not wish to be fooled by the fine words and the noble ideals which are the glory of the lang- uage of men, it behooves us, when these expressions are used by perfidious lips, to come to an understanding of what they really mean. Furthermore it is the duty of the plenipotentiaries gathered at Paris, in full consciousness of their duty, to give justice to the conquered, while the duty of the General Staffs of the armies is solely to assure, without harshness but also without weakness, obedience to the victor's commands. Besides, what the Bulgarians call justice is always something at the expense of their neighbors. Unless they get a slice of Rumania, a part of Serbia and a big piece of Greece, you hear them calling, "To the spoils!" Mr. Theodoroff, certainly an intelligent states- man, and gifted with great oratorical powers, a man whom we must credit with having been steadily opposed to the war, did not hesitate to explain to me, in the course of an interview 8 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM of more than three hours, that Greek Cavalla was indispensable to Bulgaria as being the sea-port whence her heart and her goods could most readily sail out toward Marseilles and France. Mr. Theodoroff defended the interests of his country. I listened to him deferentially, contenting myself with saying, "If you had been the victors, what would you be asking.^*" What a surprise it is, however, and how bitterly disappoint- ing to hear the same extravagant statements made by our own representatives, for they are apparently there in Paris to weigh the claims of allies and enemies, conquerors and conquered, and to find some equilibrium, even though this be at the expense of an ally ! Have we forgotten the occurrences of yesterday ; the abject perfidy of Bulgaria in negotiating with the Allies at a time when she was already riveted to Germany by bonds of steel; in mobilizing her armies while she gave them to under- stand that this was being done in their behalf; actually lying, up to the firing of the first shot of her cannons, and as cynical in defeat as she was shameless in her aggression; Serbia gasping, torn away from her land, never failing during her long martyr- dom of four years, always heroic; Rumania, trampled under foot and broken; Greece, too, making a magnificent front, just as soon as she was permitted to take up her historic tradition and destiny through the coup of Jonnart, which swept away intrigue, ignorance and stupidity, and gave at last to the genius of that great and true man, Venizelos, the place which for many months Rome, London, and Paris had been haggling about or refusing to give him.? These men affect an air of impartiality and make use of trenchant and scornful formulae such as: "All these Balkan peoples bray too much," and so Turks, Bulgarians, Greeks, Rumanians, Jugo-Slavs are all put in the same box by the tribunal of the Allies. Among these Balkan peoples there are those who have subtly plotted our death and have strained every nerve to strike the blow; the others fought for us and shared our sufferings; what would have become of the army of Macedonia, if the eleven Greek divisions which, by themselves, formed more than half of the Allied forces on this front, had not rendered possible the offensive of 1918, which, by bringing Bulgaria to her knees, was destined to draw down to their destruction both Turk and Austrian.? Against these men of varied speech that I have seen so HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 9 actively employed, I bring no formal accusation. How could I do so? They are sincere and they fully believe that they are working for the best interests of the Entente. Their only real error is, perhaps, that they are over-playing their part and making diplomats of themselves, when what is expected of them is to be soldiers. They do have another failing, but on^e that can only be defined paradoxically; they either know nothing about Balkan affairs or they know too much, if I may be permitted to express it thus. Take the case of the English, who, with the best of intentions, have sent to Sofia to form their staff certain travelers who, as being familiar with the Balkans, were in England among those militant Bulgarophiles, of whom we have a complete crew here in France as well, and over whom the great war has passed without destroying a single one of their illusions. General Napier, chief of the English General Staff, was one of these and, like the Italian consul of Smyrna, he so completely overstepped the bounds of what was proper, that it became necessary, a few weeks ago, to recall him. The others seem to ignore all the abominable excesses committed by the Bulgarians against the Greeks and the Serbs, and this wilful perversion results in the most regrettable weaknesses in dealing with them. There are in Bulgaria whole populations of Greeks who were, a while ago, driven out from their villages, and who now can- not obtain permission to return. Some are from Turkish Thrace, having been expelled by the Turks who were eager, at the time of their ephemeral victories, to reduce the numbers of the Greek element, which predominates there; others are from Bulgarian Thrace, deported from their homes by the Bulgar- ians to whom they stand in the ratio of three to one; and finally there are those who were driven out from Greek Macedonia by these same Bulgarians when the treachery of Constantine had left their doors open to the Macedonian invasion. Out of all these unfortunates many demand to be restored to their poor homes. In vain! The others, scattered throughout the land, where they are compelled to work for their Bulgarian master, are not to be found. These were cases where it was the duty of the authorities of the Allies to intervene energetically. What have they done toward repatriating the exiles or toward finding the missing.? In order to bring about even a timid 10 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM intervention, repeated insistence on the part of the Hellenic representatives has been necessary, and many a time, when confronted by contradictory affirmations of the Greeks and Bulgarians, they have solved the conflict between their duty and their desires by refraining from action. Permit me to tell you a sad story in which I shall call people by their real names. A few months ago some Greek officers of the General Staff in Sofia were informed that there was living in Stenimachos, a town near Philippopolis, in the house of Colonel Venedikof, a little Greek girl. They learned that she was thirteen years old; that her name was Anna, and her mother's name Sophie; that she came originally from Chatalja in Thrace, and that she had been living with the colonel for about six years. At the demand of the General Staff the latter was questioned. He replied that the little Anna had, at the time of the Balkan War, been found by his soldiers, in the underbrush; that she was an orphan and that he had out of charity adopted her; that she was furthermore, a Bulgarian, daughter of a dead father whose name he gave. How did he know the name of the father of this orphan found among the bushes.^ Where did this little Bul- garian learn Greek so well.'' There were many such questions in which he was not in the least interested. Then the Greek Mission ordered an investigation in the district of Chatalja. Inquiries are easy in these countries peopled by Greeks whose souls have been united by a long period of common trials and sufferings under a harsh dominion, and this is the tragedy which was at once revealed. In the month of January, 1913, in the interval between the first and second Balkan Wars, Bulgarian soldiers one day rushed into the little village of Playa and fell upon the humble home of a poor peasant woman named Sophie Melinidi who was at that time a widow, but who has since been married to Pantelis Kyriazoglou. Sophie Melinidi had two children, Anna, who was then seven years old and a boy, Michalakis, who was five years of age. It was on the little Anna that the brutes vented their spite. They had already a few days earlier failed in a first attempt. The second attempt succeeded, and in the midst of the terrified cries of the children and their mother, and the angry voices of their neighbors, the little Anna was HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 11 thrown into a wagon which disappeared at once with the horse at full gallop. This gives your heart a pang, and perhaps some of you doubt the accuracy of my tale. Let me tell you, then, that these infamous abductions are common occurences in the war customs of these Bulgarian "gentlemen"; that more than a hundred Greek children, carried off with the same savagery, have been found and delivered since the armistice in spite of diffi- culties that you can easily imagine. How many little Annas are at this moment still shut up in towns like Stenimachos! We must think of the future; a little girl is the chrysalis of a woman; she is the sacred lamp which perpetuates the life of races. There can be not the slightest doubt that the little Anna of Stenimachos is the little Anna of Playa. I have seen her mother tearing her hair in her grief, with wrinkles which give her, at the age of thirty-eight, the face of an old woman, and from her I heard the story of this tragic day in January, 1913. We find in the mysterious recesses of these reserved souls un- expected sensibilities which are the rich treasure of these simple creatures. When I asked her, "Was your Anna pretty.^" she raised her coarse, woolen skirt to dry her tears, and with a look of grief she made this reply to me in a low tone, a reply the magnificent tenderness of which you will appreciate; "A mother's children are always beautiful to her. All that I can say to you is that Anna did not look like me." Here was then a mother without a daughter and a daughter without a mother. Across the gulf of time and space we succeeded in uniting them. The mother made the long and painful journey to Sofia. We were going to call Anna there with Colonel Venedikof, and in the close embrace of mother and daughter six years of anguish and despair were going to be ended. All the lies were to be revealed. But stay! Not yet! It was the second of April when Sophie Kyriazoglou arrived at the capital of Bulgaria and here is a portion of a letter dated the 20th of May that I received a few days ago: "The Staff of General Chrétien ordered a meeting of mother and daughter. The Bulgarian authorities replied that the journey of the little girl presented difficulties and would occasion expense. They asked therefore whether the mother was disposed to meet these 12 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM expenses. We immediately replied that she assumed them, and we are still awaiting the arrival of the little girl at Sofia. For nearly two months the mother has been here in a desperate state of mind. There have been more than five letters for her to come back but we see nothing happening. The distance between Doupnitza, where the little girl is at present staying, and Sofia is only a few hours and the railroad is in operation." In the discreet reserve of this letter we can discern the bitter- ness that the delicacy of an ally hesitates to express. What France has done for our women and our girls torn from the bosom of their families by German brutality, shall she hesitate to do for the little Greek girls that have been torn from the arms of their mothers by the Bulgarians.'^ At Spa, Marshal Foch makes them understand the language which suits the case. Why do they not imitate him at Sofia. ^^ But in Bulgaria it is not only stories of refugees, of the de- portation of little girls, of the robbery of Serbian flocks or of incursions into the territory of Serbia, that space forbids me to speak of; there is a more serious thing. By the terms of the armistice Bulgarian artillery was to be concentrated in a par- ticular place, under the control of the Allies, and all the breech- pieces were to be carried to Salonika, which was then the headquarters of the army of the Orient. How many months has it taken to obtain from the Bulgarians the execution of this capital clause! The day finally came when the artillery was parked in the designated place. Is it all there .^^ Let us not be so indiscreet as to expect it. As for the breech-pieces, where are they.? At Salonika.? No, at Sofia! You have heard aright, the Bulgarian breech-pieces are at Sofia, for it is chari- table to humor the susceptibilities of the army which, at Ki'ivolak, ambuscaded and decimated a French division which was not in force. And it would be too painful to Bulgarian amour-propre to oblige them to send their breech-pieces to Paraskevopoulos, Commander-in-Chief of the Greek Army!* *Two days after I had revealed this fact the news reached Paris that Genera Franchet d'Espérey had just given orders to have the Bulgarian breech-pieces transported to Constantinople — not to Salonika as the armistice stipulated; under the siu-veillance of the Allies to be sure at Constantinople, but neverthe- less (until a later order) in Turkish territory, not at Salonika in Greek territory. Up to the limit, then, they wish to spare Bulgarian feeling too cutting a wound. Even to obtain this result a strong protest on the part of the Government at Athens was necessary. HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 13 If you will pardon the expression, I assure you that I do not want to eat the Bulgarians alive any more than I want to eat the Germans alive. I am speaking as a Frenchman of French- men who desires justice for everybody but first and foremost for his country and for the allies of his country. I demand that up to the hour of peace the enemies of the allies of France be treated on the same footing as the enemies of France. I protest against a régime of privilege which equity as well as common decency condemns. I demand that the same indignation and the same sternness should rule our conduct toward those who sought our destruc- tion at Monastir and Doiran as against those who attacked us on the Aisne and the Marne, for it is time for us to realize that France might have fallen in the Balkans, just as really as before Paris. I am indignant that when arms have just been laid down, men can have the heart to give themselves up to an exact balancing of those who have served us and those who have be- trayed us, and to an endeavor to find excuses for the latter and to reserve all severity for the former. I say that such a spectacle is immoral, and when this spectacle is given by men who, as exerting authority, ought to furnish an example, in the fear of expressing myself too strongly, I refuse to attempt to describe it. If you want to know what France gains by such practices, listen to this. In the month of March, General Grigoroff, in command of the 38th Regiment at Kirtzali, presiding over the demobilization of the 40th class, addressed the following words to the men who were going to be mustered out: "You have conducted yourselves as heroes and your hero- ism has astonished the world. If you have had to yield, it is simply the fault of the politicians. I salute you at the moment when you are to return to your villages. But do not forget that 3^ou are before all else soldiers and that it is possible that you may soon be recalled to the colors to chase out these dirty dogs of Anglo-French who have infested our country." A similar speech was made by the colonel of the 11th Regiment at Silimnos and it is probable that the Bulgarian barracks have often re-echoed to other such speeches. In very truth, to repeat the wish of Mr. Theodoroff, Bulgaria has great need of the port of Cavalla in order to send her heart out to her beloved France! 14 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM Are things in Turkey any different? Since interests are more considerable and desires keener, things are even worse. Constantinople, the city of intrigue and dickering, has never ceased to be the melting-pot in which sinister egoisms and equivocal desires, in a strange mixture, forever seethe. In bringing to light what is going on today in Constantinople a man would need to be a Balzac. When one has spent forty months in the army and has arrived from our murdered and pillaged France, how can one who for more than four years has so profoundly experienced what an enemy costs us and what a friend is worth to us, help trembling at the spectacle of a carnival where miserable Machiavellis make every effort to distort the facts and to falsify the meanings of things so rudely hammered out by a Foch, a Guillaumat, a Franchet d'Espérey and other great soldiers. In society one meets onlj^ women who pity these poor Turks, these generous and gentle Turks, for whom the war was such bitter suffering. Without a smile they tell you that the whole people shuddered with horror when they were compelled to fight their good friends, the French. They recount various incidents and do not forget to tell of the mother who, quite unlike Cornelia, was eager to withdraw her son from the army rather than send him against our troops at the Dardanelles. In the oflSces of those infallible people whom we call 'men of affairs,' and who regard themselves, by virtue of office, as political realists in the secret council chambers of those European functionaries who were always intimate collaborators with the successive Ottoman governments, even that of the sini- ster Abdul Hamid, they will authoritatively explain to you that business prosperity is closely linked up with safe-guarding this state, which we may credit with having done its best to annihilate France. OflScers will tell you, in their familiar Hugo, that "the Turk is a 'good sort of fellow' and that it is easy enough for all except those fools of Greeks and Armenians, to get along perfectly well with him." One hears even stranger things than this in some of the official quarters. And yet in those evil days of August, 1914, when Turkey was still wearing her mask of neutrality, there were only cries of joy and gladness heard in the streets of Stamboul over the first successes of the Germans, HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 15 and when the battle of the Marne was fought, no one has ever heard it said that even that peasant mother, who wanted to stop her son on his way to fight at the Dardanelles, raised a cry of joy in empty and echo-less space. "We lived then in terror of our lives," say the Turks of today, contritely. How strange it is, though, that this great love for France found at that time no way of expression, and that among this race which has never been distinguished by any great respect for human life, and where assassination has been almost a policy, no hot-head appeared to bring Talaat and his tool, Enver, to their senses by the most appropriate means ! In going the length of the Balkans, the traveller changes his position, but the sight he sees is ever the same. At Con- stantinople, as at Sofia, it is the two-faced Janus that greets you. These peoples have lost the game, but at the moment of paying the stakes, they are suddenly overwhelmed by the truth. In all haste they turn to the past their war face, and behold! it is a peace face, illumed with joyousness and fraternity, that beams upon you. So Bulgaria, after spiriting away Ferdinand and Radoslavofï, shows you Boris and Theod- oroff, and the innocent Padishah installs Ferid in the chair of Talaat. I may say without irony that there is no reason to doubt the good intentions of the men who today hold the power in Turkey. Many of them have, in fact, under Talaat's régime, paid for their honorable feelings by exile or by civic ostracism.* But when they repudiate the Unionists, do they take fully into account just what they represent, and how great a force it is that they must defeat? If we come down to solid facts, there is in reality only one party in the nation that counts, and that is the Committee of Union and Progress. *These men will not complain that they are here ma,Iigned. Auguste Gauvain, a writer who has an admirable knowledge of the Oriental Question, but whose counsels have unfortunately been honored more in the breach than in the obser- vance, wrote only yesterday, with much sense and truth, the following lines: "It is true that the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress have governed Turkey dictatorially for the advantage of the Germans. But the Old Turks of the time of Abdul Hamid followed exactly the same poUcy. The only difference between the two epochs is that, in time of peace, the Turks sought, in the other Powers, a counter-poise for the German protectorate, while in time of war, they were obUged wiUy-nUly to completely identify themselves with Ger- many. Damad Ferid Pasha himself, though he looked askance upon the Talaat- Enver-Djemal triumvirate was with them heart and soul from the begiiming to the end of the war." (Journal des Débats, June 20, 1919). 16 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM In 1908 it found itself in the presence of a people whose only bond of union was the religious solidarity of Mohammedanism. Of all the passions capable of electrifying an amorphous race this was the strangest to it, for the Revolution was, above all, the work of free-masons and of the donmes of Salonika, that is to say, renegade Jews. The Committee undertook then, re- inforced by high-sounding phraseology, to constitute a national sentiment. The Turk was to such a degree lacking in this feeling, that the idea of 'fatherland' could not be expressed in his language, and it was found necessary to borrow the Arab word vat an to designate this conception. The vatan forthwith became the grand idea and the solid platform of the revolution. Having overthrown the tyranny of the Padishah, where were they to find from now on the principle of domination and the categorical imperative if not in the vatan? Is it not passing strange that in Russia, as in Turkey, the first move of these subtle humanitarians, who were at work there, was to stir up an exaggerated chauvinism, and that Turkish nationalism came out of the Salonika revolution in just the same way that Russian nationalism began to work itself out among the dregs of Bolshevism? Having found its sphere, the Committee of Union and Pro- gress has never left it. By its unbridled nationalism, by the exaltation of the sentiment of race, and the systematic Turkif- ication of the whole Ottoman state, by the letting loose of fanaticism against the Christian populations, it has entered into hearts hitherto closed to it, hearts which the satrapie régime of the Sultans had crushed with terror, while by cor- ruption and patronage it served individual interests and thus gained a clientele. As against these are the self-styled 'lib- erals' whom our victory has put in power. They form, one may say, an élite of Turks, half Europeanized but without popu- larity and with no backing. The people ignore them because they do not speak to them in terms that they understand, and because to elemental souls, dominated by the idea of form, they have nothing to offer that is comparable to that simple and gripping phrase, 'Turkey for the Turks.' Their actual task is to liquidate the war, but no popularity can come to liquidators of failure. In fact, just as Germany is intoxicated by imperial- ism, so is Turkey infected with Unionism from one end of the HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 17 country to the other, in its capital and in the most remote vilayets of Anatolia. It is so with its Sultan in just so far as he desires to continue as Sultan. Turkey is this by virtue of her profoundest instincts, by ten years of furious political work and increasing corruption, by the tyranny of an administration that the Unionists introduced and which their creatures still maintain. She is this finally because she could not but be so, from the time when charlatans appeared to befuddle her with the only words that she could understand. I came to know at Smyrna the Governor of the province, the famous Noureddin Pasha, a pleasant, good-looking man of forty-seven, the victor at Ktesiphon and Kut-el-Amara, and the one to whom General Townshend surrendered his sword. Noureddin was, further, at the time that he had everything his own way, a steady persecutor of Greece. A league of reserve officers has been founded at Smyrna whose constitution and by-laws begins with this declaration: "Our duty is to combat to the death any decision of the Peace Congress which shall be injurious to the interests of Turkey. " In order to explain and illustrate it, meetings are being held in which they take the most terrible oaths to massacre every- body, if it is necessary. Is this the language of conquered people or of those who recognize that they have been con- quered.'^ The honorary president of this league is the Governor himself, Noureddin Pasha. There you have a real Young Turk. It is in Asia Minor that the Committee has concen- trated all its activity. At Constantinople, where the head- quarters of the Allies are situated, the Committee feels that the difficulties would be too great; Asia Minor is a very extensive country; the Allies have not as yet occupied it in its entirety; the Committee knows, further, that the unity of the Allies is only nominal; that envy and jealousy separate them. It has kept up this organization secretly and has its officers and its men; the Turkish ministers themselves agree that it possesses much money. In all the districts bands are ready awaiting the hour and awaiting the order. Mysterious councils take place day and night in tlie very palace of the Governor. The Gover- nor receives strange looking individuals who come from all over the province, and who hold long interviews with him, and some 18 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM of them go away carrying presents. He passes as being the soul of the revolt that people see is being prepared. He is a fine specimen of Young Turk. Everybody knows this or at least can know this, for even I know it. From his window Noureddin Pasha can see anchored in the harbor of Smyrna, in the splendor of the sunsets, the great war-ships of the Allies, charged with keeping surveillance over him; a French vessel, an English and a Greek; Italy, too, as is seemly, has her own ship but with different ends in view. Each of these vessels is commanded by an officer of high rank, dele- gated by the High Commissioner at Constantinople. They, I doubt not, have nothing to say to these events. During my stay Noureddin was recalled by the decree of the Grand Vizier. Was it on their intervention? Not at all. It was simply because he had refused to serve on members of the Committee orders of arrest which had come to him from his own Govern- ment. The Grand Vizier Damad Ferid Pasha and his coad- jutors are doing their best to put an end to the Committee of Union and Progress; between them and him it is a duel to the death; but are they going to imprison all Turkey .^^ Noureddin has been replaced by a good Governor who has the reputation of execrating the Young Turks. That is fine ! Consider, however, what happened on the morning of the 15th of May last, when the Greek army at last disembarked at Smyrna; from the night before, under the very nose of the good Governor and his police, proclamations inciting the inhabitants to resistance were spread broadcast among the Mussulman population and in the environs, and unknown hands were ready to open the doors of the prisons to those legally con- demned. The sixty-three deaths that resulted must be counted against the Young Turks. This was not their first misdeed; it is not at all certain that it must be their last. In the month of March they were assassinating at their pleasure in Anatolia. If I consult my travel note-book there was hardly a day that I did not note down several murders. Bands of Turks, most often wearing the military uniform, as I have learned from ocular witnesses, approach within gunshot of Greek peasants at work in their fields or ambuscade them along the roads and, firing their guns, kill them, mutilate them and escape. If, by chance, gendarmes are around, they watch HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 19 the spectacle from a distance and then enter their stations, where, as at Boudja, after a famous massacre that had filled this Greek village of ten thousand souls with cries of terror which I heard with my own ears, they passed the night in singing, playing the organ of Barbary — so rightly named— and in wild carousal. On the morrow they made a report and what do you think they had the effrontery to wi-ite? That this assas- sination of Greeks may well have been the deed of a Greek band ! I saw, on the 14th of March, at the distance of only seven or eight kilometers, as the bird flies, from the war vessels of the Entente which were there to preserve order, four corpses of Greeks out of seven that had been massacred that day. Three had had their throats cut so frightfully that their heads were nearly separated from their trunks; the fourth was partially charred. I started to telegraph at once to one of the Paris daihes an account of what I had just seen. My telegram was ready to be dispatched but at the last moment the omniscience of our Quai d'Orsay, in the person of one of its officials, inter- vened. You cannot be ignorant of the fact that, as Robert de Fiers has recently written, those who know, are always wrong in the sight of those who are ignorant, and that the per- son who is seated in his armchair in Paris is evidently better informed about things in Asia Minor than he who tells of what he sees there. The oracle of the Quai d'Orsay had decided, then, that this was a case of two bands of comitadjis who had met and of whom,. he added, one was no better than the other. In this case the Greek band of comitadjis were represented by a gathering of good peasants, men, women and children, working in their fields, none of whom were armed, the women had been able to escape, a little girl had been wounded; I had questioned a boy of fifteen years who had seen his uncle fall at his side; their names were all well known. They were a good sort. They were Greeks — for the Turk good hunting. In truth, this generation is insufferably arrogant and ignorant; I have in mind the dogmaitic official who, looking out on the budding trees in the Esplanade des Invahdes, had discovered there that Vasil Chorva, father of eight cliildren, and massacred at the age of fifty-five at Pavlouvrisi, was a chief of comitadjis. This is nothing. For you are going to be initiated into the great bloody work of the Committee of Union and Progress. 20 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM One day there came into the hands of the representatives of the Powers at Smyrna two Turkish documents emanating from the towTi of Aidin. They were sent in by a young Turkish officer of Jugo-Slav origin whose name I might give, for he is now beyond the reach of reprisals; with him the senti- ment of race spoke, and his conscience recoiled before infamy. These documents have, further, been authenticated from irrefutable sources. They bear official seals. I have had the texts of these documents examined by several experienced translators. Perinit me to set them before you. Both are dated February 25, 1919. The first comes from the Com- mandant of the Gendarmerie at Aidin and reads as follows: "To the Commandant. I call your attention to the disgraceful conduct of the Greek population toward the Turks during these last few days. We are going to devote ourselves to the annihilation of this vile people with your aid. I, for my part, am taking all the necessary measures to this effect. In the first place, I am surrounding myself with numerous chiefs of bands devoted for several years to brigandage and I am keeping them in arms within call. I have distributed guns to them. They, too, will work with you. Tell your comrades that in this undertaking they will have a chance to fill their pockets and that for us death is not (to be feared) ; death is only for these base Greeks. As soon as a little sign is given, run at once to annihilate all who are in your neighborhood. Do not recoil before any act against their women. Have no regard for their honor. For today is the time for vengeance. Forward my children! (Signed) Commandant of Gendarmerie of the Central Battalion Meiimet Arif." On receiving this order, the Commandant evidently trans- mitted it to his subordinates, and the police captains in the various stations received instructions in their turn. Here is the second document: "To the Commandant of the Central Station of Gendarmerie in Richadie (the Greek quarter of Aidin). It appears from an order of the Commandant that the spirit of unrest and excitement among the Greeks has increased in HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 21 these latter days. In consequence, when confronted by such agitation, our country requires each soldier to execute those orders for a general massacre that have been given him. Your country gives you this order. You must, then, sacrifice even your last breath for her sake. Recognize your duty. Each soldier is expected to kill four or five Greeks. Commissioned, as I am, to communicate to you in writing the written order of the Commandant, I shall, in my turn, personally give you verbal instructions as to the manner in which you must act in this regard. The duty of every soldier is to execute this. The Commandant of the Detachment." (Illegible). I have here the photographs of these documents and I gladly place them at the disposal of any who may be familiar with the Turkish language. Which is most repulsive in this order, its licentious ferocity, its cynical frankness or the crude ingenu- ousness of its transmission in writing?* There they were in the very hands of the French and English Commissioners at Smyrna and were communicated by them to the Commissioners in Constantinople. What do you think came out of it all.? Absolutely nothing. No inquest, no prosecutions, not even any disciplinary measures against this Mehmet Arif and his accomplices. Nothing! They contented themselves with informing Noureddin that something was going on at Aidin and that they were watching him; the plot having been exposed, nothing actually happened. At Constan- tinople, however, a little later, I was discreetly informed by one who was supposed to know, that these papers were for- geries; they had hardly looked at them; it was I who told them in what manner they had been authenticated. This was not the worst! In handing over these papers, the Turkish officer had revealed that at Aidin, in a certain drawer of the desk of a particular office which he designated, they would find abundant proofs of the definite and systematic organization of the massacres and of the connivance of the highest Turkish officials. A fine chance, was it not, to catch these wretches, who were making dupes of us, right in their lies and crimes. This was a matter of the first importance. *These documents will be added to the collections in the Institution of the Library and War Museum (39 rue du Colisée) where they may be verified. 22 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM Did they go to Aidin? Did they open the drawer? They did nothing. All the while in the French and English colonies at Smyrna organized efforts were being made to defend the good Turks, and you cannot tell me that these were disavowed in high places. Since in Asia Minor, as well as at Constantinople, Turkophilism carries with it as corollaries Hellenophobia and Armenophobia, I will leave you to imagine in what paradoxes the souls of victors become entangled, and in what immorality men who are fine fellows may become involved, under color of high policy, when contradictory notions are struggling for the mastery, and when the hot sun of the Orient has clouded their clear understanding. Because the Greek, ingenious, energetic and perhaps also keen in competition, shows himself jealous of the foreigner, you will find business men ready to declare that if he gets the upper hand they will have nothing to do but to pack up their baggage. Because he is conscious through his history, through race, through numbers and through interests of being the legitimate proprietor of these regions where for five hun- dred years he has been enduring the severest and the most killing domination, diplomats — or those who constitute them- selves such — accuse him of turbulence and fanaticism. In reality all the Greeks know and proclaim that, if deprived of the political, financial and technical cooperation of the foreigner — and in particular of French foreigners — they will be incapable of organizing and working territories which the anarchic indolence of the Turk has left in a state of nature, and if it happens that populations which have for so many centuries been awaiting deliverance show a little impatience, who would not be ready not only to excuse them for this im- patience but even to share it? If there are present any of our newly recovered brothers of Alsace and Lorraine, I know that they will understand me. To these Hellenic populations so grievously tried for long centuries, upon whom the savagery of Talaat has brought, since 1914, 300,000 deaths, upon whom it has in addition accumulated persecution and destruction and for whom the announcement of the victory of the Entente was, in the night of its mourning, like the apparition of a saving labarum, all those who are qualified to speak for them and HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 23 direct them have not ceased to exhort them freely to maintain cahnness and patience. I can testify that their advice has been; heard ; I would even venture to express the opinion that they were heard all too well and that if, on the morrow of the fall of Turkey, the Greeks of Constantinople had again taken posses- sion of St. Sophia, which belongs to them, a great sign would suddenly have illumined the black sky with its light and the oriental problem would have been simplified. In place of this what do we see.^^ If the Greeks are silent, people begin at first quietly and then openly to contest their right, and learned men are found, speaking all the languages of their allies, who draw up statistics and oppose to their just claims the calculations of their enemies. If they wish to speak, then they are denounced as fanatics. At Constantinople they gather in their churches, where they are by themselves, in order to vote upon a petition; the Allied authorities accuse them of adopting a provocative attitude toward the Turks. They credit them, without any reason, with the intention of celebrating, by public manifestations, the anniversary of the 25th of March, which is a religious feast day and at the same time the national holiday; the Prefect of Police openly takes preventive measures of repression and the publication of a bulletin is tolerated in which he, a Turk, threatens to have his soldiers fire upon the Greeks, our allies. It is against them that the censorship is systematically exerted. The Turkish newspapers are permitted to insult them and avail themselves of the opportunity; the Greek papers are forbidden to reply; the French papers are forbidden, even in theoretical articles, to manifest the most timid Philhellenic tendencies. At Smyrna the Allied Commissioners refuse to transmit or even to receive petitions in which the oppressed Greeks attest their desire for a union with the mother-country. Three days later they accept and transmit appeals in which the Turks proclaim that they will not tolerate the establishment of Greece in Asia Minor. The Metropohtan of Smyrna, Mgr. Chrysostom, in common with the Greek community, organizes a thanks- giving service in the cathedral in honor of the preservation of the life of Clemenceau, who had just escaped the bullets of an assassin; the Commandant of the Italian warship is present with his officers; likewise the Greek Commandant; the English 24 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM are absent; the French vessel, Democracy, is represented by two subalterns. I note these facts at random as I remember them.* When each day is crowded with its own events, which appear organically connected, can one measure the de- ception and bitterness of these tortured hearts which have put all their faith in us, or reckon what such actions threaten to cost the interests of France.'^ And if I add, without wishing to insist on it, that at Constantinople the door of General Franchet d'Espérey was almost the only one cordially and sincerely opened to the anxious appeal of the Greeks, you will perhaps understand me in part. It was well that Greek troops eventually took possession of Smyrna and the vilayet of Smyrna on May 15th last (1919). According to all witnesses it had long been necessary to thwart the evil designs of the Turks and to put an end to their bloody aggressions. It is not, however, generally known that an offer of the Greek Government to suppress all this brigandage by policing this region had been previously rejected, and that, in order that a spontaneous demand should at this time be made upon Greece, circumstances had to arise about which I must be permitted to keep silence, circumstances in which the anx- iety to bring the Turk to his senses played only a secondary part. *The first Allied vessel that appeared at Smyrna after the armistice was an English man-of-war under the orders of Commandant Dickson. At once Greek Smyrna was all agog. With cries of joy there was a rush to the very edges of the vast stone quays. Hands were stretched out toward the vessel, flags were waved and England, the AlUes and Greece were acclaimed, as well as that Providence which had at last vouchsafed that supreme joy, awaited for long generations. When the first English sailor set foot on land, they carried him in triumph, as if the Paleologos in his triumphal galley had come back from the dark ages. It was a moment of complete intoxication, an intense and solemn hour for the op- pressed people of this second Alsace. And yet that very evening at midnight Commandant Dickson landed and roused the Metropolitan, the political as well as rehgious head of the Greek community, and in a few dry phrases, told him to see to it that the Greeks from now on kept silence under penalty of forced re- pression. On the next day, a signed proclamation reiterated in harsh and threat- ening terms the verbal instructions that the Admiral had given in person, and ordered that the Greek colors draped at the windows should be taken down at once. A profound feeling of desolation succeeded the joy of the evening before. A Madame Psaltof, a patriotic Greek said confidentially to me: "We had wept with joy, but we then shut outselves up in our houses, we drew the shades and wept in our distress." Did we French at Strasburg dream of punishing the dear little Alsatian girls for the crime of shouting "Vive la France!" The same Commandant Dickson, a little later boxed the ears of a Greek correspondent who was responsible for having sent to Athens the text of a docu- ment which did not please him. HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 25 I intended at this point to tell in full the story of an edify- ing conversation that I had somewhere in tlie Orient with a very high French official. But time is passing and I must be con- siderate of the benevolence with which you have been good enough to listen to me. I carried away from this interview — or rather from two interviews — a feeling of bitterness and irri- tation which you would share if I had the time to read to you the ten pages of an exact 'procès verbal which I drew up at once. Since I am not an informer by trade, I refrain from every indi- cation as to the office held by my interlocutor or the place where I visited him. I will simply tell you that he occupied a very high position and that if I remember his evil ideas it is because they had, on his lips, a peculiar importance. Here was an official personage, charged with the duty of keeping the Government which accredited him, well informed, who began by telling me, contrary to all truth, that Turkish public opinioli was swinging toward us, that the Committee of Union and Progress was every day losing its power, and that the liberal parties had won the upper hand, although he could not help being aware that the people who are today in power can maintain themselves only behind the bayonets of the Allies, and although their power is in reality so weak that only yes- terday the English, by one of those authoritative acts which are habitual with them and which we imitate only too rarely, suddenly placed on board a vessel bound for Malta a whole gang of young Turks for whom the courts of Constantinople did not appear to have impartial enough justice or prisons with doors sufficiently secure. But this is only incidental; the scandal and immorality con- sist in the sudden release of a wave of Turkophilism which carries with it as a corollary, according to the rules of the game, a de- grading accumulation of suspicions and calumnies not only against the Hellenic populations of the Ottoman Empire but even against the Greek nation itself. For the Turks all confi- dence is shown, but for the Greeks all kinds of rancor and dis- trust. Permit me not to be more precise. My interlocutor for- got that it was only the fault of the Entente which prolonged the abject reign of Constantine, that the Greece of Venizelos took its place in the combat during the dark days when the collapse of Russia, the crushing of Rumania and the German 26 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM victories at the Somme might have made us doubt our future. He forgot, too, that the victorious operations in Macedonia would have been impossible in 1918 without the cooperation of the Greek army. Above all he forgot that, in spite of all the shortcomings of the Entente, which was haggling about money, equipment, arms and transportation, the Provisional Government of Salonika had thrown in, at the side of the Allies, an army of 65,000 volunteers, that is to say, a proportion of sol- diers which for France would have given 400,000 men. He also denied the existence of Philhellenism and pretty nearly that of Hellenism itself, adding that he saw in the Orient not a people which demanded its rights but restless and envious spirits which were constantly "squalling." He said to me: " How do you make it out that Smyrna is Greek.? " The num- ber of the Greeks in Constantinople bothered him a little; but what does the protest of 350,000 citizens amount to in com- parison with the interests of a financial company.? The daily assassinations in Asia Minor did not trouble him at all and I should be ashamed to quote the expression he used in this con- nection.* For the rest, adopting the infamous report of the Turkish police, to which I have alluded above, he did not hesi- tate to say to me that these numbers of Greeks slain might perhaps be the victims of Greek assassins. I stop here for you already know enough, but I should be wronging this gentle- man if I permitted you to believe that his love for the Turk makes him jealous only of the Greek. The Armenian, too, came in for his share. I reproduce here textually the expres- sion which his self-suSiciency deigned to give to my incompe- tence: *'I was present at some of the Armenian massacres; those massacred were in the wrong." What can we think of such language.? And what a pity that France can be thus represented in this Orient, where, in cha- otic minds, the most childish credulity exists alongside of the cleverest cunning! Do those who govern us realize that they have been betrayed? For they have been betrayed and that is the worst of it. All this equivocal policy is not their doing. All the while that, there *Among other statements which I was compelled to listen to that day I will only give the following: "Oh these Greeks! If one could only hang every mother's son of them." HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 27 in the East, financiers^ officials, diplomats, and many French and English officers holding fat jobs under Turkish corrup- tion, Italian expansionists, Levantines of all classes and all shades of morality are exerting themselves to organize the safety of the Ottoman Empire and are letting their imagina- tion play about countless combinations of controls, mandates or protectorates, here in Paris, at the table where the Great Powers are deliberating, Turkey stands condemned, and con- demned more for its incapacity than for its crimes. Sentence has been passed and nothing justifies us in fearing that it can be revoked.* I made use of the words "immorality" and "scandal." This immorality consists in entering into machin- ations which are destined to draw Europe into the Mohammedan mire in order thus to save the Turk. The scandal is that such manœuvers are carried on against the will of the Entente gov- ernments and even, so I would like to believe, without their knowledge. Wliy have I insisted on saying all this.^* Was it to gratify a doubtful curiosity and perhaps to gain some cheap applause.^ The present is no time for idle talk and those who know me will not believe me capable of this. It was for two or three very sim- ple reasons: I should not be allowed to publish these statements. This country which calls itself free and which perhaps thinks that it possesses the spirit and habit of liberty, tolerates this dishon- oring censorship, which the English and Americans have long since done away with, a censorship which suppresses not only the information which is fully spread forth in the newspapers of our allies, but even the verj^ criticism of the facts. French public opinion knows nothing of what is taking place in France, to say nothing of its ignorance of what is said or printed *This, which was true at the moment that I said it, was not true two days later. To such a degree do the decisions of the "Big Four" vacillate and waver. And yet what reply did the Allies make on January 10, 1917 to President Wilson who had, in the name of the United States, which was then a neutral, interrogated them as to their aims in the war? In a common note signed by the English as well as by the Italians, they wrote that victory signified for them "the liberation of the populations that had been subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks and the exclusion of the Ottoman Empire from Europe as being utterly foreign to all occidental civilization." Victory has come. Is it not the time for each to honor his signature and irrevocably to confirm the judgment of history. 28 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM beyond its borders; it knows nothing of what is being prepared, and nothing of the deadly consequences that are to be appre- hended. Parh anient, which is kept at a distance, is no better in- formed than the people at large. Both submit to this censor- ship and piously say "Amen" to this satrapie régime. They are amorphous. The result is that sabotage of our victory is threatened from all quarters. The old Germanophile party in England has raised its head and is working with all its might. The safety of Germany has been championed by a large part of the Italian people, and a great journal such as the Corriere delta Sera dares to write that for France to strike down Germanism is tanta- mount to embroiling her with Italy. Throughout the world of our Allies who are those, then, who dare today to speak for our enemies, the Germans, the Turks and the Bulgarians.'^ Let us tear off the masks and speak frankly. On the one hand they are the revolutionaries who deceive themselves into thinking that they can employ for the renovation of society and the establishment of universal justice the most wickedly retrogressive power in the whole world, and who, while imagining that they are using Germany for tlieir own ends are actually — I doubt not, unconsciously — acting as the tools of German intrigue and Russian Bolshevism, that is to say, as tools of Germany. In the second place comes what is even more hateful and dangerous — the hidden cabal of international finance which, before the war, by the piling up of causes for conflict, during the war, by dealings on the sly with the enemy and by manœuvers calculated to enervate the powers of resistance and foster the feelings of pessimism on the part of the weak, and since the war, by desperate efforts to which it has devoted itself in the chan- cellories, in the press, and everywhere in fact, has not ceased to look out for its own interests, for its free-masonry of appetites, and always against the national interest and the interest of the peoples who are trying to free themselves and obtain justice. Was it for this — for the peace of financiers — that all these peo- ples shed their blood .^^ Was it for the pallid peace of revolu- tionaries, under which conquerors and conquered would find themselves cast back into the same misery, that we pursued the war, enduring all its cruel sacrifices? I still hear, ringing in my HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 29 ears, the heartrending appeal of that noble Armenian, Mr. Tigran Tcheyan, who, in a voice breaking with emotion said to me at Constantinople: "We demand that a distinction be made between the victims and their assassins." This barbarous war is dominated by a fact that escapes these people, a fact that is not written down in the account of repa- rations, the tabulations of raw materials, or the tracing of fron- tiers. What makes it unique in the history of mankind is that it imposes on the world a question of conscience. Never has it been so profoundly true that the present works for the future. The intrigues and cabals of the traditionlal diplomats have had their day. The policy of quid pro quo, of compromises and bar- gaining must be ended. The great democracies have had enough of these haggling methods. We have seen them em- ployed at the Congress of Vienna, and at those of Paris and Berlin. The worM knows what the cost in blood has been of the subtle stupidities of so many talented men. We have seen them in operation from 1914-1917 in these Balkans, where the augurs of the Entente, by their failure to walk in the light, have inces- santly stumbled. It is not from the greed of financial interests, in Turkey and in Bulgaria, nor from the egoism of private in- terests in Smyrna and Constantinople, nor from religious propa- gandists in Turkey and Syria — these propagandists who, even in the very hour of victorj^ gambled with us for the safety of Catholic Austria — no, it is neither from appetites nor from reli- gious beliefs that we must ask directions for the world of to- morrow. Apart from the plain and straight road there are only traps and ambushes. The first benefit of the peace will be to oppose its barrier of brass to future wars. How can this be done if with our own hands we undertake to restore the abettors of the war of yesterday .f* There are today here in France people blind enough to take pity on Germany and to exact from us pardon and benevolence. By what paradox can we call what we judge to be pernicious here, wisdom and cleverness in the Orient ? Are we going to forget that we have there faithful allies, for whom, in the his- tory of the past, Turkey and Bulgaria were so many Ger- manies.'^ Shall we judge proper against them acts that we would judge indecent toward ourselves? Can we possibly permit them 30 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM to have the feehngs toward BerHn that too many of our agents or compatriots have for Sofia and Constantinople? But permit me to say, in closing what has been, I fear, too long a discourse, that it is not a matter of propriety alone. The Oriental Question was started in 1774 on the day when the armies of Catherine II. crossed the Danube, and the fleet of Alexis Orlofï came and threatened Mustapha III. in the Golden Horn, and it has never ceased, since that time, to poison Europe. It will be settled on that day when the successor of Mohammed II. will be sent to Asia and the Ottoman Empire reduced to the Kingdom of Turkey. The great convulsion has caused the hour to sound. Shall we, adding a new fault to our others, adjourn the day of fate.^ He whom Nicholas I., if I mistake not, called the "Sick Man" is on his deathbed. Shall we, with our own hands administer the elixir of life.f^ In 1875 Lord Derby said: "We have, by the treaty of Paris, guaranteed that he be not killed; but we were unable to guar- antee that he would not commit suicide." He has, himself, passed the strangling-cord that William II. offered him around his own neck. Shall we, acting against the interests of peace, against our own interests and against historic destiny, unknot this cord? I remember this true saying of the economist, Yves Guyot, one of those men who are not satisfied by mere words but are in tlie habit of considering facts as facts: "If so many efforts had not been made to keep him so long alive, we should prob- ably have escaped the present war." * How many attempts have been made, either rough or cordial, to galvanize him, to arouse him, to give him a semblance of nor- mal existence! All the efforts at reform have failed. Tan- zimat, Hatti-Houmayoun, Constitution of Midhat-Pasha, Macedonian Reforms, Constitution of 1908, not to mention abortive attempts, false semblances and mystifications. Such as Europe knew him in 1453, such the Turk has remained. His whole history is a history of cunning, persecution, mas- *Les Causes et les Conséquences de la Guerre, by Yves Guyot (Félix Alcan, 1916). HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 31 sacre, outrage and war. On the soil that he has occupied by arms, he leaves neither monument nor invention, neither lit- erature, art, nor industry; nothing that remotely resembles a civilization. He remains the Conqueror, his only virtues being for conquest, living only upon the labors of those he oppresses, being the least capable of improvement and the least assimi- lable of all the people on earth. With the temperament of a slave, submissive to force, and only imposing himself on others through force, he is an "anti-man, "according to the ter- rible judgment of Gladstone, as far as all the works of peace and prosperity are concerned, but a man, withal, or rather a wild beast, for the works of war and desolation. He has gained his victories by war; let him perish then by war, since this is his destiny. There are enlightened Turks. Some of them I know and es- teem. These are, however, exotic plants that flourish on the morass of the race. I have, on several occasions, spoken to some of them to this effect: It is not the war that Turkey has waged against us that con- demns her, nor is it the massacres. The war is an accident of history, from which she could redeem herself, for France might find a way to pardon her. The massacres are barbaric practices from which she might free herself. No, it is not this. It is the crushing fact that in five centuries of domination she has been able neither to govern herself nor to establish a civili- zation, nor to find a stable system of law for the peoples she has subjected, nor to make herself acceptable to them. It is the fact that the Turk is nothing but a Mussulman; that he has no other law than the religious law of the Cheri; that the Cheri, the holy book, is unchangeable and incapable of being improved; that it teaches him, along with a total scorn for those who do not share his beliefs, the futility of all human effort, and an abject submission to fate. It is the fact, too. that he remains a nomad and that for him family life does not exist. This renders him alike refractory to all political and to all social life. When the free-masons and the donines of Salonika, counter- feiting the Occident, proclaimed the equality of races in the Empire, the equality of individuals before the law, the recon- ciliation of the citizens of all classes of society, what a mockery 32 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM it was, for there existed neither society nor law, in our sense of the words. Recall this significant fact. The revolution- aries of 1908, masters of the Empire, adopted our republican motto with which to decorate their buildings and their station- ery. "Liberty" was the word that was their talisman; "Equality!" Yes! That word they must utter; but "Frater- nity!" How talk of fraternity to this supreme and chosen people, for whom there is no life save in the bosom of Islam, and who know the Christians, the Jews, and all non-Moslems, oiily under the name of rayas, that is to say, cattle.'^ In their secret council-chambers the matter was long discussed. "Fra- ternity" was condemned and "Justice" a word that bound them to nothing, was written in its place. It does bind us to something, however. We have fought, suffered and bled for a just peace. A just peace means, in the first place, to oppress no man's conscience; it is this principle that we are working to establish. Shall the conquerors tolerate among the conquered what they forbid to their own people? When all the people of Europe are to be liberated, shall we leave beneath the knee of the most ferocious of oppressors those who have bled most deeply.'^ A just peace means to restore Constantinople to Europe, to give Bulgaria to the Bulgarians alone, and Turkey to the Turks alone. Let there be no fiction of a control or a protectorate, for these would be arbitrary and equivocal. Let there be open, fair and just solutions. Liberty for the Armenians as well as for the Greeks, without restrictions or subterfuges, liberty for each and every man, be he friend or foe, but liberty within the limits of his rights, and with all regard for the rights of his neigh- bor. Liberty and justice make eternal appeal to the human conscience. From a just peace will come that real, that grand peace, the name of which the world has just written in blood. On that day when the Padishah shall set up his begemmed throne on the Asiatic plateau, when the Cross, the symbol of the law of the ages, rises above Saint Sophia, the peace of the Orient will be secure. Let us remember that the war rose out of the East. If the monster shall once more come up over the world, it will be the East that will have given it birth. SMYRNA -A GREEK CITY By Charles Vell.\y After long discussion, the varied turns of which it is here useless to recall, Smyrna and the region about it appear to have been definitely detached from Turkey by the decision of the Great Powers, in order to be placed under the control of Greece. Thus we see realized, at least partially, that one of the revendications of Mr. Venizelos on which, in the Memorandum presented by him to the Peace Congress at the end of 1918, he insisted most forcibly, when after having shown the dangers of any experimenting with an autonomous state in Western Asia Minor he claimed for his country, by all the rights which history, culture, geographical and economic conditions justify, the province of Aidin and a part of that of Broussa. Even if Greece in the last analysis is forced to accept a zone much more restricted than this — a solution to be deeply regretted on many accounts — there is no doubt that the inclusion of Smyrna in this zone gives her an invaluable prize and suffices to explain the bitter rivalries that have arisen as to this strip of Turkey. Historical arguments have time and again been invoked in order to demonstrate the Hellenic character of Smyrna. Without underestimating the value of these arguments we must certainly admit that states of today cannot possibly be recast on the basis of history and that in those regions where a given power has in the past reigned, it conserves rights only in the measure that its race, its language and its national con- sciousness, all that constitutes its ethnic vitality, continue to maintain themselves with sufficient force. If Greek culture and a Greek population had no longer existed in Smyrna, the diplomats would have made short shrift of Greece's claims, and the glorious name of Homer would have been powerless to defend the illustrious Ionian metropolis against the cold realities of international politics. 33 34 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM But even the most stubborn enemies of Greece have never been able to contest the fact that there is in Smyrna and throughout the western coasts of Asia Minor, a flourishing and tenacious Hellenism which no persecution, and no amount of oppression or propaganda, has ever been able entirely to destroy. The successive shocks of 1770, 1797 and 1821, though external to Smyrna, roused bloody echoes over there from which Hellen- ism suffered grievously, but from which she rallied each time with greater discipline and will. Thus, in 1914, when the Euro- pean War broke forth and the future of Turkey was at stake, the voice of the Greeks of Asia Minor was raised with a force which could not be stifled and to which in a greater or less degree the world was forced to listen. In vain were stratagems multiplied to pervert the decisions of the Conference. At times the effort was made to excite the uneasiness of the Great Powers by picturing the predominance of Greek commerce in Smyrna if this city became a part of Greece, and the dis- astrous consequences of this for the interests of the other European nations. Again it was affirmed that the Greek populations of Asia Minor did not really desire to be annexed to Greece, but dreamed rather of autonomy under a regen- erate Turkey, or of some independent constitution. These arguments, which were circulated in order to harass the west- ern governments and which did at times distract their atten- tion, have ended by vanishing away into thin air before the inflexible and exact demands of Asiatic Hellenism. On the twelfth of March, 1919, at the time when the Peace Conference was discussing their fate, the Greeks of Smyrna sent to the High Commissioners of England, France, America, Italy and Greece at Constantinople the following telegram: "It has come to our attention that doubts have been conceived as to whether the sentiments and desires of the Greek people in Asia Minor have been sufficiently and effectively manifested concerning the settlement of their fate. Consequently we, the lawful representatives of the people of Smyrna and of the Orthodox Christian population of this province, consider it our supreme duty to declare to the Commissioners and through them to their respective governments that the ardent, profound and unshaken desire of Unredeemed Hellenism in Asia Minor is, purely and simply, their union with Greece." HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 35 At the same time the Metropolitans of Smyrna, Ephesus, Philadelphia, Heliopolis (Aidin), Sokia, Pisidia and Adalia, after a conference held at the seat of the Metropolitan in Smyrna, sent to tlie same Commissioners a long memorandum, which it would be out of place to cite in its entirety here, but from which some passages may well be repeated : "Hellenism in Asia Minor," they state, "energetically re- jects any other solution than its union with Greece. It is flourishing Greek culture which will assure the progress and development of the country. The Greek populations of Asia Minor, by their sufferings under Turkish persecutions, and by their valor on the field of battle, have acquired the right to full and complete liberty. All foreign penetration of our land, under any form whatsoever, would be disastrous. We claim with all our strength the entire unity of the Greek national and geographical heritage through union with Greece, and we guarantee order and prosperity to the country without distinction of race or religion. Any other solution will only result in prolonging our martyrdom." Again, after recalling the ancient glory of Ionia, and dwell- ing on the cruel persecutions to which its inhabitants were subjected during five centuries of Turkish domination, they enumerate the sufferings endured by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the course of the war. "During this World War we have had our interminable black book, which can hardly contain the tale of all the destruction that even the Turks make no effort to conceal, the premeditated massacres, the floggings, the murders en masse, the hecatombs of the labor battalions, the outraging of girls, the desecration of the churches, the forcible conversions of children to Moham- medanism, the assaults on the honor of the family and the home, and thousands of other unheard of crimes, conceived, prepared and methodically executed against the unhappy Christians." Finally their memorial ends with the following entreaty: "In return for all that precedes, for the incalculable services rendered to civilization, to which it contributed ancient Greek philosophy and the pure dogmas of Christianity, for all that it has suffered for nearly five centuries, for all that it still feels 36 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM strong enough to accomplish for the civihzation of the Orient, for its unshaken faith in its own restoration, Hellenism in Asia Minor, forming one body, one soul, one voice, rises with one accord against the Turkish tyranny which constitutes a blot on modern civilization, and demands of the great saviors and pro- tectors of the free nations its union with free Greece, that the source of its age-long tortures may be at last dried up." What is this Hellenism, so alive and so passionate? What does it represent in the country as a whole? What is its share in the intellectual, moral and economic life of Smyrna? What is its title, what are its rights? I do not pretend here to give a complete answer to all these questions, but I have been witness in Smyrna to various manifestations of this Hellenic leaven. In the most varied circles, and oftentimes in those most hostile to Hellenism, I have questioned the persons who could enlighten me on this point, and from this most searching and impartial investigation I content myself here with drawing the most obvious of conclusions, which can, in no possible way, be disputed. The Ottoman Government has never been able, nor has it ever wished, to establish any exact ethnographic statistics. We must not, however, reproach it too harshly, for any census of this nature meets, in Turkey, with almost insurmountable difficulties. Races, languages and religions are inext)ricably mingled, and, according as we take an ethnic, linguistic or reli- gious point of view, we reach results which have nothing in common and which permit contradictory conclusions. In cer- tain villages of Asia Minor, Greek populations have, in the course of centuries, gradually adopted the use of the Turkish language, and at times the customs of the Mussulman religion, while all the time conserving an ardent Hellenic patriotism. Furthermore, some Mohammedan populations know only the Greek language. Lastly, the application of the Capitulations, through the privileges thus gained, has caused certain elements to pass over to the ranks of this or that nationality to which they were otherwise not at all related. In the last analysis it is the religious statistics on which one is most inclined to depend, for in spite of their variations they appear less subject to change and confusion. HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 37 During the war the Government bureaus of Smyrna under- took to draw up, with all possible precision, statistics of the population of the city. These statistics, which were, I believe, never published, since their object was to meet the needs of the military police, may be considered as nearest the truth, for they bear no taint of diplomatic arguing or of religious polemics. According to these statistics the population of Smyrna is thus made up: 150,000 Greeks, 110,000 Turks, 15,000 Armenians, 10,000 Jews, and about 15,000 foreigners.* We see by these figures that, even on the basis of Turkish authorities, not only do the Greeks form the most important constituent part, but that they come very near to having an absolute majority, for they practically counterbalance all the other elements taken together. We must further take account of the fact that among the protégés or nationals of the European nations a cer- tain number of Greeks are to be found who, though classed as French, English, Italian or Russian subjects, remain, never- theless, obstinately faithful to their Hellenic traditions and birth. While the "Levantine" population lives by preference out- side of the city, especially in the more aristocratic quarters, Cordelio and Bournabat, and the Mohammedans are almost exclusively massed on the slopes of Mount Pagus, where is to be found also the Jewish quarter, the Greek inhabitants occupy all the lower city, including the maritime and trade centres, with the exception only of some sections of the Bazaar. The traveler who disembarks at Smyrna enters immediately into contact with a Greek city; the only language that he hears about him is the Greek; the natives with whom he enters into relation are Greeks, and if circumstances do not lead him to a narrower search, he will go away with nothing but the impres- sion of having seen in Smyrna a Greek city, where some Turkish functionaries of the custom house or the palace are all that make one think of an absent master. Because of its numerical importance the Greek population of Smyrna does not, as is the case in other Mohammedan cities, restrict its activities to certain trades. Here the Greeks are everywhere, from the porter of the quay to the great landed pi^oprietor, from the humble artisan to the doctor, the lawyer, *As to Turkish statistics see Appendix II, p. 51. 38 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM the banker and the ship chandler. In each of these classes, bound to each other by a strong moral discipline, vibrates the same Greek patriotism, the same dream of national unity, the same co-ordinated and patient effort. There do not exist be- tween them those quarrels and lines of cleavage so familiar in the countries of the west. All work together at the same task, in the same spirit, with the same self-abnegation and with a sentiment of equality which brings them together, unites them and blends them. If we wish to see Hellenism in Smyrna expressing itself in all its spontaneous activity we must pass the courtyard of the Metropolitanate, ascend the steps of the Bishop's palace, and enter the hall where the Metropolitan himself receives, each morning, all those who have need of his help. It is difficult to forget the curious spectacle of this room filled with a crowd of petitioners of all sorts, rich and poor, who come there as to a refuge that is always open. There is no formality. An usher or two are there for the simplest services. People enter without being formally announced. The crowd besieges the prelate, but no one turns away without being able to present his request and obtain an answer. For the Metropolitan listens to everybody, busies himself with everything from the most serious matters down to the most humble details. On the day that I came to see him some little children's shoes were lying on his desk and formed the subject of very lively discussion. It was a question of selecting a model for distribution among the Greek refugees driven out of the interior of Asia Minor by the persecutions of the Turks. The Metropolitan did not regard it as beneath his dignity to busy himself with such a minor matter, for in the domain of charity the importance of a question is not measured by its nature so much as by the good that may result from it. On this day, furthermore, there was an especial stir in the prelate's bureau. A delegation of peasants of Boudja, with a priest at their head, had come to report to him the murder of seven Greek peasants, taken by surprise, and massacred on their farms by a band of those Turkish soldiers, who, though recently discharged, have retained their arms and are used for exploits of this nature. These tragic incidents have become so frequent that there are to be found in Smyrna, so the Metropolitan told me, no fewer than five hundred orphans whose parents have HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 39 been killed by the Turks. All these sorrowing people come to the Metropolitan for consolation. But it is not only religious consolation that they ask and receive. It is in the last analysis the great patriotic dream which best comforts these tortured souls and nourishes within them the hope of a future of liberty and justice. Under a vigorous, patient and methodical impelling force the laborious achievements of the Greeks of Smyrna attest the vitality of a race which has never lost faith in its destiny. Schools, hospitals, orphan asylums, dispensaries, activities of every nature are so many witnesses of this constant and varied effort. All this draws its support solely from the gifts of the Orthodox community which, by its inexhaustible spirit of soli- darity, meets all demands upon it, undertakes everything and assures the prosperity of each of its numerous organizations. In order to understand to what point this feeling of soli- darity reaches, and to appreciate how each Greek of this large city realizes his duty toward his brothers, one may consult, for example, the last report of the trustees of the Hospital of Saint Charalampos, which is the chief Greek hospital in Smyrna. This report covers the period from March 1, 1914 to February 28, 1917, which was almost entirely a period of war, that is to say a time when individual resources have been to a marked degree reduced, when the ordinary activities of life have been most disturbed, and Hellenism in Asia Minor from a general standpoint most menaced and compelled to dissimulate its zeal. Now, even in this time of misery and uncertainty, all, from the richest to the most humble, were con- tributing their share. In the long list of donors is a gift of 50,000 piasters ($2,300) along with gifts of 6, 7 or 8 piasters ($.30- $.40), which represent perhaps an equal sacrifice and one just as deserving of praise. Apart from these money gifts, gifts in kind are even more touchingly eloquent. In this other list we find mentioned a few okes of oil, or of milk, a lamb, some eggs, and some cotton. Beans, potatoes, cheese, vinegar, raisins, wheat, wine, olives, soap, potash, alcohol, chloroform, quinine, cognac, plates, slippers, jars, needles, anything that is of the slightest use, figure in this list of donations, and the account is so well kept, with such meticulous exactness, that even a modest gift of two dozen matches is scrupulously recorded. 40 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM With its four hundred beds, its annual expenses of 10,000 Turkish pounds ($46,000), with its wards for surgery, pathology, gynecology, ophthalmology, mental maladies, its maternity department, its old peoples' asylum, this Greek hospital of Smyrna of which the unwearied Dr. Psaltofï is the active soul, is one of the organizations most indicative of Hellenic initiative. I give here some figures covering this same period (1914-1917), figures which are far below the average of the times before the war, for since then a part of the hospital has been requisi- tioned by the military authorities and this has reduced the efficiency of the hospital by nearly a half. From the 1st of March, 1914, to the 28th of February, 1915, the entrance of 1,801 patients was recorded and this, added to the 300 patients already in the hospital at that time, gives a total of 2,101 persons that were treated during this twelve- month. Out of this total of 1,801 entering, all were not Greeks, for the hospital is open to all confessions and to all nationalities. Thus for this year we find, along with 1,702 Greek Orthodox, 71 Mussulmans, 12 Jews, 8 Armenians, 6 Catholics, etc. In the following year (1915-1916) the total of patients was 1,608, and in the third year (1916-1917), 2,500, among whom the proportions of Orthodox, Mussulmans, Jews, etc., were nearly the same as in 1914-1915. To these patients treated within the hospital are to be added the outpatients who were naturally more numerous; in 1914-1915, their number was 22,572, in 1915-1916, 22,352, in 1916-1917, 15,841, making a total for the three years of 60,765 of which 37,922 were Orthodox, 2,850 Mussulmans, 1,266 Jews, 349 Catholics, and 114 Armenians. Alongside of these charitable works are to be placed the schools. What an important place schools occupy in the pre- occupations of the unredeemed Greeks is well known. It is through these that for a century the elevation of the Greek people has so methodically taken place. It is through their schools that the Greek communities, lost sometimes like little islands in the sea of strange nationalities, have maintained themselves and kept alive. It is the schools that have main- tained Greek traditions, have kept up the effort to attain freedom and national unity, have supported the moral and patriotic faith of the Greek world, triumphing over all obstacles, all persecutions and hatreds. It is not the place here to recall HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 41 by what disciplined and persistent enthusiasm, by what ob- stinate devotion, these scholastic riches were accumulated in a hostile land. The school formed, as it were, the barracks of Hellenism, the forge where patient preparation was made for the restoration of the fatherland, and each man from his gifts, while living, or his legacies, after death, felt it an honor to contribute to this great work a part of his fortune. Could such a spirit, which made Greek schools arise in the smallest villages of Turkey, fail to manifest itself with a peculiar force in the old Ionian capital? In fact, great though the expenses were of maintaining its hospital, the Orthodox Greek community of Smyrna devoted three times this sum to its schools. In 1914 the budget of the School of the Evangel, the most important of the Greek schools, endowed with a magnificent library of more than 30,000 volumes, amounted to 7,000 Turkish pounds ($32,200) ; that of the Central School of Saint Photeine for young girls to 3,000 Turkish pounds ($13,800) ; that of the Homerion School for young girls to 1,300 pounds ($5,980) ; that of the district schools to 6,000 pounds ($27,600) ; that of the private schools to 3,000 pounds ($13,800); and finally, that of the sectional schools to 2,000 pounds ($9,200) ; forming thus a grand total of 506,000 francs ($101,200). In 1919 the figures are even higher but it is impossible to estimate them in francs because of the variations in exchange. If we take into account that, for the Greek community of Smyrna, the Turkish pound in paper, for interior exchange, keeps its nominal value, the difference between the two budgets is enormous, for in 1919 the expenses amounted to 111,000 Turk- ish pounds as compared with 20,300 in 1914. Out of this 111,000 Turkish pounds in paper,* 35,000 went to the School of the Evangel, 15,000 to the Central School of Saint Photeine, 6,000 to the Homerion School for girls, 30,000 to the district schools, 15,000 to the private schools and 10,000 to the sectional schools. What Hellenism in Smyrna does for the social and scholastic life of the Greeks represents only a part of its activity. The life *At par this would represent $510,600 and this is what it really meant to the people of Smyrna. To calculate it at the rate of exchange of March, 1919, unfavor- able though it was, these 111,000 Turkish pounds represent even then $160,000. The Greek community of Sm>Tna estimates at about $240,000 the total expenses of all its educational establishments. 42 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM of Smyrna is after all concentrated in the economic domain. Questions of a financial, industrial and commercial order occupy the first place. It is in this domain, therefore, more than in any other that Greek genius gives fullest expression to itself, all the more because, in this field, being forced to struggle against a formidable foreign rivalry, it has to put forth an effort which is infinitely more sustained, more varied and consequently more meritorious. In the region around Smyrna, as in the rest of Turkey, great industries are only exceptionally to be found. It is above all the small industries that are most iuWy developed; these do not demand large capital, or a numerous personnel; they are better adapted to the local customs and the geographic neces- sities. In lack of any official statistics a patient economist of Smyrna, Mr. J. B. Yannikis, has recently undertaken a method- ical census of the industrial establishments of Asia Minor. The results of his inquiry, which have been rigorously tested, are as yet unpublished, but he has been good enough to communi- cate the results to me and I have drawn from them some inter- esting facts as to Smyrna and its suburbs. This 'Greater Smyrna' includes 391 factories. Of these 344 are Greek, 14 are Turkish, 3 Armenian, 9 Jewish, 5 French, 6 English, 1 Belgian, 3 Italian, 1 American, 3 Austrian and 2 German. The great numerical superiority of the Greek factories would be more overwhelming yet, if the fact could be taken into account that the factories classed as Turkish are generally only apparently such, for they are usually operated under Greek direction and with a Greek personnel. If one wishes, further, to multiply such points of comparison, the predominance of the Greek element in the industry of Smyrna is constantly evidenced. Of a total of 6,787 horse- power utilized as motive-force for the 391 factories of this region, the Greek factories absorb 3,725 and the remainder is distributed as follows: 20 horse-power in the Turkish factories, 52 in the Jewish, 31 in the French, 1,742 in the English, 850 in the single Belgian factory, 12 in the Italian, 95 in the Ameri- can, 235 in the Austrian and 25 in the German. The same proportions are to be observed if we study the number of workmen and other employees: 4,584 workmen HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 43 and 485 clerical employees in the Greek establishments; 115 workmen and 4 clerks in the Turkish factories; 12 workmen and 2 clerks in the Armenian, 127 workmen and 13 clerks in the Jewish, 113 workmen and 10 clerks in the French; 1,062 workmen and 25 clerks in the English, 520 workmen and 8 clerks in the Belgian, 70 workmen and 5 clerks in the Italian, 20 workmen and 2 clerks in the American, 53 work- men and 11 clerks in the Austrian and 32 workmen and 3 clerks in the German. From the point of view of their real value, calculated on the cost of installation, the Greek factbries represent a value of 1,035,795 Turkish pounds, gold ($4,764,657), while all the other factories, taken together, do not amount to more than a total of 394,320 Turkish pounds ($1,813,872). As far as production is concerned, Greek houses maintain their superiority over their rivals. They produce annually 127,800,000 kilograms of wheat flour out of a total of 139,200,- 000, the Austrian mills being their only rivals and they, longo intei'vallo, for they produce 11,400,000 kilograms annually. Out of a total of 37,440,000 kilograms of raisins the portion produced by the Greek houses is 28,440,000, the rest coming from the Frenc'h, English, Italian, German and Jewish houses. Finally, as to all the products other than flour and raisins, the output of the Greek factories represents a value of 3,560,550 Turkish pounds, gold ($16,378,530), while that of all the other factories combined does not surpass 700,215 pounds ($3,220,989). We see by these figures that the industrial supremacy of the Greek factories of Smyrna is absolute, for in each category they, taken alone, perceptibly surpass all their rivals counted together. It is to be regretted that such statistics have not been drawn up for the commercial houses and that, as to them, we are forced to rely on less precise considerations. Certainly none of those who have visited Smyrna and have stayed there any length of time, can deny that all the small commerce, retail stores, hotels, cafés, groceries, dry goods stores, bookstores, etc., are exclusively in the hands of the Grteeks. But although we can have no doubt that the Greeks predominate in internal commerce and trade, we are far less 44 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM certain as to foreign trade or, at any rate, as to the export of indigenous products, for, as to the importation of foreign goods, the preponderance of the Greek houses admits of no discussion ; the supplying of all the Greek shops of Smyrna, its suburbs and the surrounding country with European goods would suffice to maintain this superiority. For a long time this exportation business which was based on the old system of sending the goods on consignment, remained in the hands of the Greek houses of Smyrna. Later, when European merchants came to Smyrna and organized more modern methods, in particular the system of selling on samples, Greek commerce, being unable to adapt itself so suddenly to new exigencies, suffered an eclipse. Today the ground lost has been in part regained. Greek merchants are too clever not to adopt a method which has assured the success of their rivals and, at present, their part in the total export business of Smyrna is becoming more considerable from year to year. The time is not far distant when they will have regained the leadership of former days. We may observe an analogous phenomenon in another branch of trade; that of the representation of foreign houses. Here, too, the Greeks had been left far behind by the agents of European houses. Twenty years ago, out of 300 foreign commercial representatives or agents of factories established in Smyrna, there were only 15 or 20 Greeks. Since then the proportion has been considerably modified in consequence of a systematic effort which deserves to be briefly explained, because it permits us to understand, in a particularly clear case, the qualities of perseverance and solidarity, which are among the most permanent characteristics of the Greek race. This change was due to the support of the great Greek banks (the Bank of Mitylene, the Bank of the Orient and the Bank of Athens), whose branches in Smyrna, established during these last 25 years, naturally took in hand the cause of their com- patriots. Up to that time the foreign banks systematically favored the other indigenous elements, so that the Greeks, deprived of 'references' could not hope to obtain the privilege of representing western business houses. As soon, however, as the Greek banks came to their aid and furnished them with HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 45 the necessary references, thus accrediting them with the great exporting houses of Europe, a new future opened itself out to them and they entered upon this branch of trade with success. At the same time they took account of what they lacked in commercial training along this line. We see them entering into a real apprenticeship. They developed the study of foreign languages, especially of French, which is the current language of commercial exchange in the Orient, but also of Eng- lish, German and Italian. They organized excursions to Europe in order to study on the spot commercial customs and methods, to secure personal relations, and to bring back precious lessons. The result has been that in this branch of commerce from which they were twenty years ago almost totally excluded, they have acquired an undeniably important place, from which it will not be easy to dislodge them. If we wish to extend these observations to the region around Smyrna and to the neighboring cities, we shall reach similar conclusions. For in agriculture, in spite of the unfavorable attitude of the Ottoman government, the Greeks have come to play a rôle which is not to be despised, and although it is a fact that they form only a minority among the great rural pro- prietors, it is they, generally speaking, who assure the function- ing and the prosperity of agricultural exploitation. The war has furnished a decisive proof of this, for upon the deportation of the Greeks into the interior, all cultivation came to a stop, neither the Turks who remained in the villages, nor the 7no- hadjirs* having been able or willing to carry on this work. I have received, as to this point, a testimony that can not be suspected of partiality toward the Greeks, that of the Turkish Governor of Tchesme. This region, one of the richest in the vicinity of Smyrna was, when I was there, at the end of March 1919, in a state of the utmost desolation. No trade, no agriculture, the fields fallow, the vineyards destroyed, the orchards abandoned, the fig-trees ravaged and the houses in ruins. Why? Simply because the Greeks had gone and the Turks could not fill their places. "It was the Christian element," the Governor told me, "that made the fortune and 'Mussulman immigrants brought in by the Turkish Government from the provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Western Thrace, and installed in the coast regions in place of the deported Greeks. 46 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM prosperity of Tchesme. Now everything is dead and every- thing will have to be begun all over." And everything will arise again; it will be begun all over. It will be necessary to replant the vines and the olive orchards, to rebuild the houses, to reorganize the commerce and to fill up the gaps that the persecutions, deportations and epidemics have made in the population of this unliappy country. If only the inhabitants are allowed to settle once more in their villages, under a régime of guaranteed liberty, the future will be assured and prosperity will speedily return. At Chios, on the hills that dominate the little town, great barracks have been constructed for the families of the refugees. These have come from the shores of Asia Minor, especially from Tchesme, and there, from morning till evening, in mute con- templation, their heads veiled in mourning, they look across the narrow channel, and see brightly gleaming in the sunshine the land from which they have been exiled for more than four years. This land ought to recall to them only servitude and suffering. But it is their land, the land of their fathers, of their ancestors, of thirty centuries of Hellenism. If they are separated from it by some kilometers of sea, their eyes at least never leave it. In vain has the attempt been made to trans- port them to continental Greece. They have resisted all solici- tation, all injunctions, for there, at least, as long as they can see the shores of their home country, they seem really not to have left it. It is a singularly moving sight, this crowd of unfort- unates who turn their fevered eyes, lit with a mystic patriotism, toward this land of Asia, so near and yet so far, where so many evils have always threatened them but which they love never- theless with such fervor that at times, in the darkness of night, some of them, unable longer to resist the attraction which draws them, break away from surveillance and against orders steal away on frail boats to revisit their homes, to touch the crumbled walls, even though they must thus fall into the hands of their enemies. Sights like these enable us to measure the profound strength and the mysterious virtue of Hellenism. On this soil of Smyrna, where flourished the greatest genius of ancient Greece, the bonds of history have unsuspected power. "They reproach us," said a young Greek woman of Smyrna, "for not HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 47 having participated in the war long enough to deserve the reah- zation of all our prayers. But our war, our war, I say, has lasted for five centuries." And it is true! For five centuries this Greek population has been living in the hope of deliverance and with such trembling between hope and fear that it has seemed to it that the Turkish conquest was but of yesterday. How, then, can we wonder at the species of delirium which took possession of Smyrna when, on the morrow of the armis- tice, a Greek torpedo-boat entered the harbor. The crowd wept, kneeled before the sailors, kissed their hands and their very feet, and bore them in triumph along the quay. More recently j^et, when the Greek cruiser Averoff was sent to Smyrna to stay, the same enthusiasm broke forth, "Never", said a Turkish newspaper in Smyrna, "have so many and so large Greek flags been raised; they were as large as the 'Grand Idea. From the windows of the houses they reached almost to the ground. Sail-boats, yawls, and rowboats ceaselessly carried thousands of people of all classes to the vessel. Men, as well as women and children, covered with kisses the legend- ary boat and caressed it with their cheeks in order the better to feel its presence." Finally, we have all heard in the midst of what indescribable manifestations the debarkation of the Greek expeditionarj' force took place, the force, I mean, that was ordered by the Powers to occupy Smyrna and a part of its vilayet. One may dispute as to the limits of Asiatic Hellenism, as to the strength of its penetration, as to the reasons, geographic, economic, or political which make for or against its destinies; but if there is in all Asia Minor a city the Hellenic character of which can not be disputed, and which, all through the vicis- situdes of the ages has been able to keep its national traditions intact, it is certainly Smyrna. This with its crown of Greek cities from Cydonia to Ephesus represents, there on the Aegean, the first cradle of Greek civilization. APPENDIX I Letter to Le Temps on the Economic Future of Smyrna {Puhlished May 10, 1919) Smyrna, April 1919. At the moment when an appeal is to be made to the Peace Conference to decide definitely upon the fate of Asia Minor and especially as to that of the province of Aidin, which has already occasioned so many disputes, I should like briefly to recapitulate here for the readers of Le Temps, the conclusions to which a searching investigation, carried on at Smyrna, has led me. It is well known that Greece claims the annexation of the entire province of Aidin with the sole exception of the sanjak of Denizli, where the Mohammedan element has the decided preponderance. The Great Powers have, up to the present, taken quite different attitudes toward this claim. Some have formulated objections of a geographic or economic nature. Others, though favoring, in principle, the Greek contention, propose to reduce quite considerably the territorial zone which would be given to Greece and which, according to their plan, would begin, in the north, at the Gulf of Adramyttium and would end, toward the south, near Hieronda, opposite the island of Samos. To examine and discuss each of these arguments would evidently take us too far afield. I will therefore limit myself to certain statements which deal more or less completely with the economic objections. 48 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 49 Can tlie province of Smyrna, as Greece demands, be sepa- rated, administratively and politically, from the rest of Asia Minor, or is this separation bound to produce economic con- sequences dangerous alike for the port of Smyrna and for the interior of the Anatolian peninsula ? Anyone who will take the trouble to make an impartial investigation on the spot, will carry away, I believe, the same impression as I did. Not only would the commerce of Smyrna not suffer from such a political separation, but it would find on the contrary, paradoxical as it may seem, a new element of activity. I have consulted at Smyrna the statistics of the Chamber of Commerce and those of different commercial organizations; I have studied the movements of importation and exportation, the amount as well as the classification of the merchandise, the places of origin and the destination of these goods; and I have found that the commerce of Smyrna is nourished, to the extent of 75%, by the province of Aidin alone. The rest of Asia Minor furnishes only 25% and the goods thus feebly represented are for the most part imports. Even if one admits, therefore, that the port of Smyrna might lose a part of this traffic, the only result would be a relative better- ment, to its advantage, of the balance of trade. But the governmental régime of the hinterland, no matter how hostile one may suppose it to be, could never break off entirely its economic relations; the railroads and the caravan routes fix the itineraries of trade exchanges, and we must not forget that Smyrna is the only port of all Asia Minor which is adequately equipped to satisfy the needs of maritime commerce. Any change in government would be a change for the better from present conditions, which are truly lamentable. The province of Aidin is very rich, but agriculture under a Turkish adminis- tration meets with insurmountable difficulties. Suppress the present administration and you do away with the difficulties. Just as soon as this fertile region recovers order and peace, its production will be such that the commerce of Smyrna will ther'e find at once an inexhaustible source of activity and profit which will more than compensate for what it may lose in other ways. 50 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM For the same reasons, and as a consequence of these very observations, the economic situation of the interior of Asia Minor will not be disturbed by this proposed political separa- tion. We have just seen that the commerce of the interior vilayets with that of Aidin is unimportant. How can any measure whatsoever, then, injure it, since it is already reduced to a figure lower than which it does not seem likely to go? The truth is that the vilayet of Aidin from the geographic, and economic point of view, constitutes a sort of distinct zone which has its own individual life and which may suffice to it- self without demanding anything of the neighboring vilayets. This was proven in the course of the war, when Rahmi Bey, by giving this vilayet a sort of temporary administrative autonomy, could assure to all the population the necessary resources, with- out exporting anything it is true, but also without importing anything. The only question which deserves consideration is that of wheat production, for it is in the sanjak of Denizli that the wheat fields are found. Local public opinion, in Smyrna, as well as in the rest of the vilayet, protests against the separation of this sanjak which, in spite of the undeniable preponderance there of the Mussulman element, should from the economic point of view, follow, so it seems, the fate of the other sanjaks. But what is true of the sanjak of Denizli is still more true of the other parts of the vilayet of Aidin. If it is undeniable that this vilayet can, without any disadvantage, be detached from Turkey in Asia in order to be united with Greece, it is on the express condition that it shall not be cut up, or arbitrarily divided, and that it shall keep intact its geographic physi- ognomy and its administrative frontiers. If we believe that the commerce of Smyrna has nothing to fear from a decision such as that which Greece requests from the Peace Conference, it is because we have in view the attribution to Greece of the entire vilayet. To reduce the Hellenic zone to a meagre band along the coast, not extending beyond the Gulf of Hieronda and not extending inward more than eighty kilometers, is actually to create the danger, which they are trying to avoid, and to give occasion to unrest which would otherwise not exist. If the Conference wishes to act in a safe and sane manner, it will refuse to cut up this part of Asia Minor which constitutes HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 51 a perfectly homogeneous whole, but will leave to it that unity which has been caused by the profound influences of history. It will thus avoid creating, on the west coast of Anatolia, a narrow zone which will live with difficulty and will have neither political nor military security. No matter at what point of \'iew one places himself, the territory of Greece in Asia Minor must extend as far south as Castellorizo, unless one is willing, by too timid measures, to compromise the interests and the future of a population which has suffered much in the past, but which carries within itself all the qualities and resources requisite to cause the civilization of olden days to flourish again in this New Ionia. Charles Vellay. II Letter to Le Temps on Turkish Statistics {Published July 3, 1919) The Central Committee of the Society for the Defense of Ottoman Rights, which is only a poorly disguised reconstitution of the Committee of Union and Progress, with the object of impressing the Peace Conference, has had printed and dis- tributed a "Comparative Chart of the Populations of the Vilayet of iVidin," which deserves some attention, for more than any other document does it reveal the strange state of mind prevailing in higher Turkish circles. This chart or table is based "on the statistics of 1917," and this fact alone is enough to show how scandalously unfair it is. It is well known that from 1914-1917 the Turkish Government deported to the interior of Asia Minor the greater part of the Greeks of the coast of the ^Egean and that nearly all the others, terrified by the persecutions, have sought a refuge at Chios, Samos, Lesbos or the Greek mainland. It is from this country, systematically robbed of its Greek inhabitants, that statistics favorable to the oppressor are now being drawn, as if crime created rights, and as if all that was necessary was to massacre and deport entire populations in order to bring about a state of affairs against which the claims of the victims would have no effect. 52 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM It would take too long to examine these curious statistics district by district, and so I will content myself with a few specific examples which will permit us to judge the entire system. The city of Smyrna and its immediate environs (Cordelio, Vourla, etc.) form the only part of the vilayet of Aidin, where, because of the interests of the city itself and the troublesome presence of foreigners, the Turks did not dare to apply the principle of mass deportations. The result is that for localities like Vourla the bad faith even of the Mohammedans is forced to submit to the law of evidence and to concede to the Greeks a majority, if not exact, at any rate huge, admitting a propor- tion of 22,383 Greeks to 9,516 Turks. In the case of Smyrna itself, such an admission would carry consequences too serious to allow them to make it. It is far better to lie. Behold, then, the table which was presented to the Conference: 111,486 Turks, 87,497 Greeks, 24,403 Jews, 12,857 Armenians and 1,936 foreigners. Now, nothing can be more erroneous than this. We have seen above (page 37) that the statistics that I was able to see at Smyrna — secret Turkish statistics and therefore honest statistics — give totally different figures, which I here repeat as they were dictated to me by the Mohammedan official who had them in his possession: 150,000 Greeks, 110,000 Turks, 15,000 Armenians, 10,000 Jews and about 15,000 foreigners of other ethnic allegiance. We see, then, from a comparison of these two tables that the Turks have, as far as Smyrna is concerned, two quite different sets of statistics; one, as exact as possible for their own use, and the other, as inexact as possible, destined to be used for the edification of naive Europeans and too trusting diplomats. In the same table of the vilayet of Aidin, the district of Tchesme was represented by the following figures : 7,985 Turks and 197 Greeks. How could there have been, right in war time, 197 Greeks at Tchesme? It is an inexplicable mystery! Per- haps this figure was given in the attempt to make people be- lieve that a foreign-born minority could live in 1917 side by side with the Mussulmans. At all events, let me give my per- sonal testimony as to this point. I visited Tchesme on the 24th of last March and had a long and interesting conversation with the Turkish governor of the district as to conditions in the to^Ti and the country round about. From the account HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 53 that he gave me, on the basis of the official Turkish statistics, I learned that at that time (March, 1919) the population num- bered 12,038 inhabitants, including the Mohadjirs. Before the war it numbered 45,265 inhabitants. If there had been no immigration of Mohadjirs, the difference between the two figures would have represented the number of Greek inhabitants who had disappeared in consequence of voluntary emigration or of deportation. But we should actually subtract from the number of the Mussulmans that of the Mohadjirs, who are not indigenous inhabitants, but have been settled in Tchesme only since the departure of the Greeks. The governor could not give me the precise number of these, but he estimated it at about half the total number of inhabitants. We must then conclude that before the war the district of Tchesme numbered approximately 40,000 Greeks and 5,000 or 6,000 Mussulmans. We see how this fact became distorted in the statistical table of the Society for the Defense of Ottoman Rights. In order not to prolong beyond measure observations, which could only give similar results, I will call attention to only one more point; the district of Phocea. The famous statistics of 1917 reveal there 8,147 Turks and 69 Jews. That is all, and it is probably exact. I visited, at that same time, the two villages which bear the name of Phocea, the Old Phocea and the New. The Old Phocea which had 7,000 or 8,000 inhabi- tants before the war, had only about 300 when I visited it last March. Since no Mohadjirs were settled at Old Phocea, these 300 inhabitants represent practically the total Turkish popu- lation before the war; the 7,000 otlier inhabitants were Greeks. All that is necessary in order to convince one's self of the void left by the exodus of the Greeks is to pass along the streets of this unhappy city. Only here and there is an inhabited house or an open shop to be seen! Elsewhere is only silence, death, and ruin. New Phocea is more alive, because a certain number of Mohadjirs have come to increase the Mussulman minority. Before the war the population of New Phocea, nearly equal to that of the ancient, was made up, according to information that I gathered on the spot, of 1,700 Greek families (7,000 persons) and 150 Turkish families (600 persons) ; in March, 1919 54 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM there were about 400 Turkish families (1,600 persons); all the Greek population had disappeared, having been deported to the interior or having taken refuge in Mitylene. These are facts that the Turkish statistics do not show. Based on an abnormal and temporary state of affairs, drawing argument from the persecutions that they ought, by all right, to endeavor to deny, to conceal, or to extenuate, they are virtually a public and convincing admission of the systematic depopulation carried on by the Turkish authorities throughout the whole littoral of Western Asia Minor. In the last analysis, therefore, all this tendencious argumentation comes back against Turkey and constitutes an accusation so definite, so eloquent and so complete that it ruins the Turkish thesis which it seeks to support. We must, however, add that at the present time these statistics of 1917 no longer correspond to the actual state of affairs. The Greeks deported to the interior — or at least those who survive — are returning to their hearths and taking posses- sion again of their property. Those who have taken refuge in Greece will also return. Though reduced in numbers by mis- ery, epidemics, and ill-treatment, the Greek majority, so pre- ponderant in the important places, will become sufficiently strong to drive into oblivion these artificial statistics which will remain only as one witness more of the barbarity which Turkey has evinced during this period toward the populations of foreign blood. Charles Vellay. HELLENISM IN ASIA MINOR IN THE MIDDLE AGES. By Charles Diehl (Translated from an article in La Revue Hebdomadaire of March 29, 1919) The place that Asia Minor holds in the history of ancient Greece is known to all. It was on the coasts of Ionia, in the great flourishing cities like Miletus and Ephesus, Priene and Phocea, Smyrna, Colophon or Clazomense and in the islands which skirt the coast of Anatolia, in Lesbos, Chios and Samos, that the torch of Hellenic civilization was lighted even before it shone forth in Greece proper. It was there that epic poetry took its rise and that lyric poetry had its marvelous bloom later; it was there that for the first time in the Greek world the philosophers attempted to explain the universe, and the historians to record the history of humanity; it was there, too, that for the first time artists endeavored to realize their dream of beauty. It can rightly be said, therefore, that "Ionia was truly the school of Greece." It was from Asia Minor as weÙ as from Greece that Hellenism shed its bright rays to the extremities of the Occident in that Magna Grœcia so full of Ionian colonies, and even as far as the shores of distant Gaul. Everybody knows, too, the rôle that Asia Minor played in the great expansion of Hellenism which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, and how alongside of Antioch and Alexandria, Pergamum became one of the intellectual capitals of the new world. Next to Halicarnassus and Cnidus, where the most illustrious masters of the fourth century had left incomparable monuments of their genius, Rhodes, Tralles and Pergamum became centers of admirable schools of art, and Myrina saw the birth of those charming terra-cotta figurines 55 56 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM whose elegant and supple grace equals that of the statuettes of Tanagra. Asia Minor, finally, took a large part in that great movement of civilization which caused Hellenism to pene- trate to the very heart of Asia, as far as Bactria, which became a province of Greece, and even as far as India, where an art permeated by Greek influences flourished in the Gandhara. No one is unaware of what Anatolia was during the first centuries of Christianity, and of the glory of the churches of Asia Minor, which were made famous by the memory of St. Paul and St. John. It was in Asia Minor, at Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon that the solemn assemblies were held in which Christian dogma was settled and the Christian faith established. In Asia Minor some of the most celebrated among the church fathers were born, St. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, who made of Cappodocia in the fourth century one of the most glorious centers of our religion. What is not so generally known perhaps is what Asia Minor was during the long, troubled centuries of the Middle Ages and how in this Christian empire of Byzantium from which Greece of today takes its rise as much at least as from ancient Greece, Anatolia was truly the reservoir of the forces of the monarchy. For ten centuries of history, centuries that we too often forget, the Byzantine Empire carried forward and enlarged Hellenism; and in none of the provinces of the monarchy did the vitality of the Greek race, its marvelous power of assimilation and expansion manifest themselves more strongly than in Byzan- tine Asia Minor. It was there that in spite of the rude blows delivered by the Turkish conquest, eastern Hellenism was able to continue to exist, obscurely, to be sure, but with tenacity and strength; it was there that the resurrection, which in the nineteenth century once more made a considerable part of Anatolia a real Greek land, was slowly prepared, and it is there that this dead past gains an importance and significance for the history of our own time; it forms the strong bond by which the tradition of ancient Greece is attached to the realities of the present hour.* *I anticipate in this brief article, statements wliich will shortly appear in a volume which I am pubUshing in G. LeBon's "Bibhothéque de philosophie scienti- fique," entitled: "Byzance, Grandeur et décadence." HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 57 L In the administrative and military organization of the Byzan- tine Empire greater importance was always attributed to the Asiatic part of the monarchy than to the European. In the themes of Anatolia (administrative districts of the Byzantine Empire) were concentrated the best and most numerous ele- ments of the imperial army. In the hierarchic classification of dignitaries the governors of the Asiatic provinces held a rank far higher than those of the provinces of Europe, and their remuneration in like manner was far greater. These indica- tions are of no little importance. They attest the fact that, in the opinion of the imperial government, the Orient — in which were included, also, for purposes of administration the two rich European provinces of Thrace and Macedonia — had a far greater importance than the poor and mediocre districts of the Occident. In Asia there were governments of immense extent; those of Anatolia, Armenia, Thracesia, the Opsikians and the Bucellarians. fertile and prosperous, which were generally obedi- ent and peaceable, and which paid their tributes exactly; pro- tected on the side of the sea by the imperial fleets and on the interior frontiers by an uninterrupted series of powerful for- tresses, inhabited by a population of Greek origin that was sufficiently homogeneous, devoted to commerce, industry and agriculture, and conserving the traces of tlieir old civilization, these provinces, as has been said "really formed the Roman Empire,"* Constantinople being, as has been cleverly remarked, "only a bridge-head on the European shore."t If, compared with the capital, which was the luxury and ornament of the Empire, the Byzantine province appeared everywhere as a sound, robust and vigorous element, it was in Anatolia above all that this strength showed itself, and the decadence of the monarchy dates from the day when it lost Asia Minor. From very ancient times the ethnography of Asia Minor has been subjected to few changes. It was always the Greek race and the Greek language that dominated there. The Anatolian peninsula suffered from barbarian invasions far less than the Balkan Peninsula, and in spite of dangerous crises it strongly *A. Rambaud, U empire grec au Xe siècle, p. 255. fNewmann, La situation mondiale de l'empire byzantin avant les croisades, p. 65. 58 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM sustained the assault of the Arab incursions up to the end of the twelfth century. Although, no doubt, as a result of war and civil discord, the population of Anatolia was weakened, diminished and thinned out, it was not at all modified ethno- graphically. Time, of course, introduced certain foreign ele- ments, German or Slav mercenaries, Syrian, Arabian and Armenian colonists. Taken as a whole, Greek Asia Minor with its homogeneous population, its famous cities, its glorious history persisted, and this was due not only to an element of cohesion and force; "by religious and monarchic feelings, by tradition, above all by the maintenance of peace and order that were so necessary for their commerce, the Greek countries gave a good example to the other races."* Anatolia furnished the Empire with its best soldiers. On the coast, in the maritime themes of Samos and the Kibyrraiots, were recruited the greater part of the vessels of the imperial fleet. In the interior the rough mountaineers of Isauria, of Lycaonia, of the Taurus, and the sturdy peasants of Cappa- docia, the needy but valiant nobility of the Armenian districts gave the army most admirable contingents. It is in Anatolia, above all, that we find those military fiefs, handed down from father to son, the whole life of which centered in training for war. In Anatolia lived the war-like Acrites, those guardians of the frontier who so marvelously developed their energy for war-like adventure in the constant struggles in which they engaged on the marches of the Euphrates and the Taurus. At an early time, too, great estates were established in Asia Minor, whose proprietors, amid a cortège of clients, vassals and soldiers, lived a feudal life on their lands. The élite of Byzantine aristocracy was of Anatolian origin. It was from Anatolia that all the great families sprang, bearing the names of Phocas, Skleros, Maniakes, Dalassenos, Diogenes, Botani- ates, Doucas, and Comnenus, whose glorious deeds fill Byzan- tine history. In their pride these Asia Minor barons considered themselves members of a nobility that was far superior to the aristocracy of the provinces of Europe; in any case they justi- fied their claims by the preeminent services which they ren- dered to the Empire. They provided it with its best oflBcers *A. Rambaud, L'empire grec au Xe siècle, p. 267. HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 59 and its most illustrious generals. By their presence they gave the Asia Minor troops an incomparable solidity and cohesion. Brought up from their very boyhood as soldiers, these noblemen were splendidly trained and adapted to war. The system of regional recruiting, furthermore, placed under their orders men who knew them, their valor, their riches, their achievements; men who in civil life were often united to them by the bonds of clients or vassals. Such leaders had in the eyes of their soldiers an extraordinary prestige and popularity which was maintained by their liberality and the benefits that their soldiers expected from them. The regiments of Anatolia were therefore ready to follow their generals anywhere with an unshakable devotion and fidelity. In this great Anatolian aristocracy the Empire found its best servitors not only for the army but for all the departments of public administration. Anatolia, Georgia, subject as well as independent Armenia, formed a nursery for Byzantium of high dignitaries and generals. A host of soldiers of fortune from there made their way to the capital in order to try to obtain court rank and dignity; the feudal nobles of Asia Minor regarded it as an honor to have all the members of their families serve the imperial government. In the ninth and tenth centuries the court and the army were filled with men from Asia Minor. Byzantine art with a picturesque realism was pleased to represent them as they passed through the streets of Constantinople with their swarthy complexions, their hooked noses, their almond-shaped eyes, hidden beneath shaggy brows, their pointed beards and their long, black hair falling over their shoulders. History shows them rising to the highest ranks and at times even to supreme power. The dynasty which goes by the name of Macedonian was in reality of Armen- ian origin. The Roman Emperor Lecapenus was born in the theme of Armenia. The most illustrious generals of the Em- pire, Gourgen, Phocas, Skleros, Maniakes, as well as many others, belonged to the grand nobility of Anatolia. And from among these nobles came some of the most glorious Byzantine emperors, Nicephoros Phocas, John Tzimisces, a Roman Di- ogenes, and the princes of the Comneni family. We may see with what scorn an Asiatic writer of the eleventh century 60 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM compares an emperor born of Anatolian aristocracy with a noble of the western provinces who seems to him without race and without country. II. Thus Anatolia formed a reservoir of energy and force for the Empire. Life there, as far as we can see, contributed to main- tain these qualities of vigor and activity. The extant lives of the saints born in Anatolia show the great development that agriculture had attained in the eighth and tenth centuries. Whether in the theme of the Bucellarians or in that of the Thracesians, whether it be in the region of Miletus or of Paphlagonia, we find mention everywhere of fertile grounds that robust laborers had brought under cultivation. Certain passages permit us to guess at the extent of this rural exploitation. The fortune of such and such a personage — assuredly a man of considerable importance in his village but a man who was not a noble but simply of good country family — included fifty farms, about which were lands of considerable extent, well cultivated and well irrigated, which produced abundant crops ; to this was added a quantity of stock : six him- dred cattle, a hundred teams for cultivation of the soil, eight hundred horses out at pasture, eighty draft horses and mules, one thousand two hundred sheep ; numerous servitors with their wives and their children lived on the estate, and in the center rose the old family mansion, large and beautiful, with its recep- tion rooms, its grand dining room, splendidly decorated, in which was to be seen the enormous round-table in ivory emboss- ed with gold, which afforded a place for thirty-six guests, with its secluded gynekonitis where the women lived far from indis- creet glances and never going forth from the house. There were of course more modest fortunes: a house, some fields, a pair of oxen, a horse, an ass, a cow and her calf, two hundred and fifty beehives, constituted the whole wealth; a servitor and a maid-servant constituted the whole menage. Existence was difficult. Often it was necessary to buy the requisite stock for cultivation on credit, to borrow money to live on and bring up a family that was ordinarily numerous. But from top to bottom of the social scale life appeared equally simple, strenuous and vigorous. The man directed the work of the farm and at times cultivated the soil; he drove his plow and his oxen HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 61 himself; the wife worked with her servant at the household duties; she tended to the cooking, dusted the house and set the table; the children of the family waited on the table when guests were entertained. All the family lived together on the estate, the sons, the daughters and the children of these daughters, in a close and affectionate union. Hospitality was free, charity abundant, piety simple and profound. Thus Anatolian society appears full of solid virtues. This was not all. A curious passage of the historian Leon Diacre shows that bonds of devotion and fidelity existed be- tween these Asia Minor barons and the people of their prov- inces. Bardas Phocas, nephew of the Emperor Nicephoros, patrician and duke of the theme of Chaldea had been disgraced on the death of his uncle and interned at Amasia. With the aid of two of his cousins he escaped from prison and betook himself to Csesarea and Cappadocia, where his family possessed inherited property, where he himself had his feudal palace and where the name of Phocas was illustrious and popular. He at once found support and soldiers for the revolt that he had planned. "All those," so the historian says, " who had bonds of blood or relation- ship with him ran to him in crowds." His cousins brought him troops; his father, escaping from exile on Lesbos, brought him Macedonian mercenaries; above all, his wealth, the prestige of his name, his liberality, the vast hopes that were placed in his success attracted innumerable partisans to him. One, of whom Leon Diacre speaks, was a curious figure. He was called Simeon, surnamed Ampelas because he was a proprietor of large vineyards. He was famous throughout the east for his wealth. He was not of noble birth but by his strength and valor he was the peer of the best chevaliers. A natural solidar- ity attached him to the party of Phocas for among all these grand archons who dominated Asia there were not only family alliances but a community of interests and sentiments which made of them a real caste, redoubtable and proud, with feelings of unlimited devotion and unshakable fidelity. Other causes tended to maintain Anatolian energies. From the shores of the Black Sea to the regions of the Euphrates and Mt. Taurus Asia Minor was in contact with the Mohammedan world. In these frontier provinces peopled with soldiers and bristling with fortresses where life was spent under the con- 62 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM stant menace of Arabian incursions, with the constant thought of returning blow for blow, surprise for surprise and raid for raid, people lived a rude, dangerous and heroic life. A little military book of the tenth century, a treatise on tactics pre- served under the name of Nicephoros Phocas, pictures to us in vivid colors the active, brutal and perilous existence on the confines of Cilicia or on the marches of Cappadocia with the eye constantly on the watch against ambush and the spirit alert to follow up the movements and discover the tricks of an indefatigable and elusive enemy, with the sword always ready and the horse always saddled to battle with and repulse the invader. The popular Byzantine poetry has likewise cele- brated the magnificent epic of these wars in Asia Minor. The chanson de geste of Digenis Akritas shows what this frontier country was, where heroic and chivalrous feudal nobles sus- tained in the name of the emperor the eternal struggle against the infidels. It was the country of the Akrites or guardians of the border, the country of the Apelates, a sort of knightly brigands alwa.ys in quest of adventure, the country of heroic duels, of the carrying away of women, of pillage and surprise, of massacres and adventure, of love and war. Popular imag- ination has without doubt embellished the pictures of its hero with a glamor of elegance, chivalrous courtesy, magnificence and splendor; Digenis Akritas appears in the poem as a veritable Paladin, but this way of living, in spite of this glorification which idealizes it, permits us, nevertheless, to see its real and permanent basis of brutality and cruelty; it was a society with violent habits where force created right and where the sword prevailed; a society of rude, cruel, pitiless soldiers, for whom life was one perpetual battle and whose chief care, while await- ing the death that they braved each day, was to fight gloriously and joyfully for the defense of the Empire and the Orthodox Church, for the love of glory, woman and gold. For all these reasons the men of the Asiatic provinces were steeled for a life of struggle. Besides, their country was rich. The fields of Cilicia and Cappadocia, the themes of the Thrace- sians and of the Bucellarians, were amazingly fertile, well culti- vated, and fully developed regions. Anatolia was full of large cities, many of which, such as Csesarea, Ancyra, Amorion, Amasia, Chonae, Pergamum, Philadelphia and Nicea seem to HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 63 have been prosperous up to the twelfth century. Ports like Adana, Tarsus, Adalia, Ephesus, Smyrna, Phocea, Kerasunda, Sinope and Trebizond showed a fruitful commercial activity. The life of the great Asiatic barons, as represented by history and the popular epic, was full of luxury, wealth and splendor. The palace of Digenis Alcritas, built on the Euphrates in the midst of wonderful gardens, sparkled with gems and gold. On the walls brilliant mosaics represented the exploits of Samson and David, of Achilles and Alexander, the adventures of Ulysses along side of the history of Joshua. The fêtes given in these palaces were of incomparable magnificence: vessels of pure silver, costly jewels, silks of wondrous designs, precious enameled work, beautiful tapestries, dazzling processions, splendid hunting outfits, costumes of unheard of richness, the most magnificent of weapons. Undoubtedly here too the epics exaggerate the luxury displayed by these great feudal families of the Asiatic provinces. But their wealth was real and this as well as their valor contributed to the power of the monarchy. Another source of strength in Byzantine Asia Minor was the intensity of the religious life. If we run through the lists of bishops in which the suffragans of the Patriarch of Constan- tinople are recorded, we find that at the beginning of the tenth century there were in Anatolia more than four hundred metro- politans, archbishops and bishops. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, although the Turks had conquered the greater part of the country, there existed nearly fifty métropoles as centers of ecclesiastic circumscription; and if, quite naturally, the greater part of the Christian centers were in the western part of Anatolia and near the coast, it is, nevertheless, worth noticing that, in the interior, too, there were to be found here and there. Christian communities of considerable im- portance. Monastic life was just as flourishing. Olympus in Bithynia and Mount Latros near Miletus were filled with monasteries that were celebrated throughout Byzantine Asia Minor; even in the solitudes of Cappadocia numerous monasteries were established, in which have been found, in the last few years, hundreds of frescoes, painted from the ninth to twelfth cen- turies, which are counted among the most interesting monu- ments of Byzantine art. Nothing shows better how far Greek 64 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM culture had penetrated, even into these remote regions. The church, in Asia Minor, as elsewhere, formed the most efficient instrument for the propagation of Hellenism. In the Byzantine Empire, just as is the case today in the whole Christian east, religion was always closely bound up with nationality: what really made the unity of the Greek monarchy of the Middle Ages a fact was the common profession of Hellenism and Christianity. It was in this way that the imperial government, at all periods of its history, was enabled to assimilate refractory elements and to expand its influence among the peoples recently conquered. More than once, in brutal fashion, it deported entire populations in order to estab- lish Greek colonists in their places; more often still it repopu- lated in this way countries that had been devastated by war and robbed of their inhabitants. But above all did it multiply the establishment of new bishoprics, designed to place the im- print of orthodoxy upon the country and thus win it over to the Byzantine civilization. It was thus that in eastern Cappa- docia, on the very frontiers of the Moslem world, in the upper Euphrates valley and in the whole of Armenia, Hellenism per- meated the people through the instrument of religious propa- ganda, each new bishropic forming another center of Greek influence. Among the most interesting phenomena in this Byzantine Anatolia is this great achievement, in which appear not only the power of assimilation and expansion possessed by the Byzantine Empire but also the political sense of this wise administration, which was really tlie sturdy support of the monarchy. It was the church that succeeded in giving Asia Minor its cohesive strength, through casting in the Hellenic mould all the populations that lived there, while it, at the same time, propagated the profound and fertile influence of Greek culture out beyond the natural limits of Anatolia. III. Assuredly this strength that Asia Minor brought to the Em- pire was not without its dangers. This grand nobility of Ana- tolia, proud of its birth, its wealth and its power was, generally speaking, of a strangely independent nature. At the same time that these feudal princes remained faithful subjects, they were quite undisciplined subjects, who treated the emperor almost HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 65 as their equal, feeling that they had the right to give him advice and taking it quite ill if he dared to dispense with it. In their distant manors, in the midst of their vassals and their soldiers, they regarded themselves almost as sovereigns. "When a cause is just," declared Digenis Akritas, "I fear nobody, not even the Emperor." And when the "Basileus" traveled in Asia Minor, as soon as he entered the frontier provinces, he left behind him the greater part of his courtiers, for it was the privilege of the Akrites to escort him and guarantee his safety. One may easily guess the perils that might arise from such a situation, the temptations that it afforded the Asiatic aris- tocracy to manifest its dissatisfaction or to gratify ambition by uprisings against the imperial government. It was in Asia Minor that almost all the great insurrections broke out which shook the Empire so frequently, and most of the usurpers who aspired to the throne were governors of oriental themes or noblemen of Anatolia. The history of the Asiatic Fronde, of the formidable uprisings of Bardas Skleros and of Bardas Phocas, which, at the end of the tenth century so profoundly disturbed the reign of Basil II. and threatened to shake the throne itself, are enough to show the reality of these perils. Even the central power itself could not look without some feeling of distrust upon these barons who were far too powerful, too rich, too popular, and in too perfect control of the troops that they commanded, and although it was glad to make use of these magnificent warriors, it never ceased its efforts to diminish their power and their influence. Perhaps these very measures, right in principle, but at times ill-advised, wrought less injury to the feudal nobility which they were designed to strike, than to the Empire itself, whose means of defense they weakened. It is a fact that in spite of its independent and haughty atti- tude this Asia Minor nobility, and Anatolia itself in its en- tirety, had a profound feeling of its duty toward the monarchy. There was, to a degree greater than one would believe, a real Byzantine patriotism. There is extant a curious polemic from the tenth century that bears this significant title: The Patriot (Philopatris) . The chanson de geste of Digenis Akritas clearly shows the same sentiments. The hero appears as the defender of the Empire and Christianity. The Emperor praises him for 66 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM this as much as for his valor. In truth, in the mind of Digenis the Empire and Orthodoxy are inseparable terms, two aspects of one and the same duty. To protect fully the frontiers, to reduce the infidels to submission, to permit the Orthodox Roman Empire to live at peace, protected from attack, was the hero's fixed ideal, the great service that he rendered and desired to render to the monarchy. This consciousness that the poet has of the Byzantine nationality is something remarkable and tends to show that it truly represents the sentiments that governed this Anatolian society, which was more truly homo- geneous than that of the rest of the Empire, more thoroughly Greek in language and race, and more profoundly permeated by religious and monarchic sentiments. Thus during long ages Asia Minor formed the strength of the monarchy. As long as Byzantium possessed the coasts of Anatolia, where it recruited the best of its war vessels, its fleets prevailed in eastern seas: when it lost these, toward the close of the eleventh century, the ruin of that navy that had so long been the glory of the Roman Empire soon followed. Just so long as Byzantium was the mistress of these oriental themes, whence she drew not only the flower of her soldiery but her best officers and generals, her army derived from this reservoir a most remarkable strength; when, at the end of the eleventh century the Seldjuk Turks, victors in the decisive battle of Manzikert (1071), established in the heart of Anatolia the sultanate of Roum, the Empire received a terrific blow from which it never recovered. As long as Byzantium kept the rich and fertile provinces, full of large and flourishing cities and of crowded ports, it found with no difficulty the resources requisite to meet its expenses; on the day that it lost these, the sources of its economic prosperity were dried up. At the end of the eleventh century Asia Minor, devastated, depopulated, and exhausted by war, ceased, even in the regions which remained under the imperial control or temporarily returned to it, to be of any help to Byzantium. The Comneni were the last of the great feudal families of Anatolia to appear in Byzantine history. If, in the thirteenth century, the emperors of Nicea, in the northwest of the peninsula, and up to the end of the fifteenth century the emperors of Trebizond in the north maintained, not ingloriously, the influence and prestige of Hellenism in HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM 67 Anatolia, it is certain that in the thirteenth, and even more in the fourteenth century, Hellenism was driven back before the rising tide of Islam and the Orthodox church, on which it had leaned, was incontestably decadent. And yet so powerful and so profound had been the Hellenic imprint with which Byzantium had marked this country that it was never completely effaced even under Turkish domination. It is not the place here to show how, in spite of persecutions, the Greeks of Asia Minor faithfully supported the Œcumenical Patriarchate and succeeded, under the shadow of the church, in conserving their national consciousness. Nor is it the place to show how, in the nineteenth century, the admirable vitality of Hellenism in Anatolia was again evinced, and how the Greeks of Asia Minor, starting from the coast, spread along the lines of railroad that penetrate to the heart of the country and, with a marvelous tenacity, reconquered to Hellenism, step by step, a considerable part of the interior of the land. * But I must cite here some statistics, whose exactness speaks most eloquently; they show better than any course of reasoning could, that in spite of their sufferings, in spite of the terrific massacres of the last few years, Hellenism still holds its own in Asia Minor. There are at present in Anatolia nearly 1,700,000 Greeks, who form in the single vilayet of Smyrna a compact mass of 622,000 persons, in that of Brussa 278,000, in that of Trebizond 353,000. If we draw a line from Panormus, passing east of the peninsula of Artaki, on the sea of Marmora, and ending at Makri, opposite Rhodes, the belt thus formed, comprising western Anatolia and extending inland from eighty to one hun- dred kilometers from the coast, will comprise more than 800,000 Greeks (1,200,000 if we include the inhabitants of the islands on the coast), with 514 churches and 454 Greek schools, at- tended by 75,000 pupils. Smyrna, where, out of a total popu- lation of 400,000, there are more than 200,000 Greeks, is, in this region, the great focus of Hellenism. If one traces about this city an arc of a circle, with a radius of 105 kilometers, it will take in more than 600,000 Greeks. It has been justly remarked that in all Anatolia and "even in those regions where the Greeks are in a numerical minority, *As to this subject one may profitably read the first half of a book by Mr. Leon Maccas, L'hellénisme dans l'Asie Mineure, Paris, 1919. 68 HELLAS AND UNREDEEMED HELLENISM Hellenism represents the most vital and progressive ele- ment."* This is not simply a result of chance. Undoubtedly, since the distant days of the Middle Ages, Hellenism in Asia Minor has been subjected to great losses. It has had to aban- don a large part of those eastern provinces of the peninsula where it was once dominant, and although, in the provinces of Adana, Konieh, Angora and, further north, in those of Sivas and Kastamuni, we still find considerable masses of Greeks, the total number of whom amounts to more than 300,000 souls, it is nevertheless certain that today the Greek populations are concentrated in the regions of Trebizond and, more particu- larly, in the western portion of Anatolia, regions which were, for long centuries, lands that were supremely Greek and Chris- tian. Yet, everywhere, by its economic activity, by its intel- lectual achievement, by the zeal with which it establishes schools and propagates Greek influence and culture, as well as by its language and its religion, this Hellenism strangely re- calls the Hellenism of the Middle Ages. It carries on and con- tinues the traditions of that Hellenism, and so, with all its roots, it goes back into that distant past, all too little under- stood, by which the Hellenism of Asia Minor is so closely linked to Ancient Greece. It is on the basis, therefore, of thirty cen- turies of history that the Greeks of Asia Minor may legiti- mately claim their right to independence. *Masson, Smyriie et l'hellénisme en Asie- Mineure (an unpublished report). THE AMERICAN-HELLENIC SOCIETY, INCORPORATED President Nicholas Murray Butler, Ph.D., LL.D. Vice-Presidents Charles W. EUot, Ph.D., LL.D. Jacob G. Schurman, D.Sc, LL.D. Elihu Root, LL.D., D.C.L. Ckairman Executive Committee Frederick Cunliffe-Owen Treasurer L. J. Calvocoressi Secretary Carroll N. Brown, Ph.D. James M. Beck Carroll N. Brown Nicholas Murray Butler L. J. Calvocoressi Frederick R. Coudert Frederick Cunli£fe-Owen Charles W. Eliot A. Barton Hepbvirn Directors Theodore P. Ion Thomas W. Lamont Charles R. Miller W. Pellowes Morgan Henry Morganthau E. H. Outerbridge Alton B. Parker Edward D. Perry Elihu Root Petros Tatanis Henry W. Sackett Jacob G. Schurman Oscar S. Straus Constantine Voicly George M. Whicher Edward D. Adams C. A. Ahlstrom LeRoy W. Baldwin Peter T. Barlow Philip G. Bartlett William N. Bates Edmiind L. Baylies Anthony Benachi George Blumenthal Albert Breton Franklin Q. Brown Thomas A. Buckner Wm. Allen Butler R. J. Caldwell D. Callimachos Mitchell Carroll L. D. Caskey George H. Chase WiUiam A. Clark C. A. Coffin Howard E. Cole John Constas N. C. Culolias R. Fulton Cutting Robert W. DeForest William C. Demorest Raphael Demos Cleveland H. Dodge William H. Dunbar Coleman Dupont Abram I. Elkus Guy Emerson Richard E. Enright Samuel W. Fairchild Frederick E. Famsworth William S. Ferguson Regular Members C. H. Fiske Edward W. Forbes Austen G. Fox P. A. S. Franklin A. S. Frissell Albert E. Gallatin James W, Gerard Thos. Dwight Goodell RoUin P. Grant Charles B. Gulick WiUiam D. Guthrie John Henry Hammond WiUiam F. Harris George Harvey Bert Hodge HUI Alex. G. Humphreys Phoenix Ligraham C. N. Jackson Walter Jennings WiUard V. King Maurice W. Kosminski Benjamin B. Lawrence C. W. Littlefield Clarence H. Mackay Alfred E. Marling George MaxweU Emerson McMillan Walter H. MerraU John G. Milbum George Higgins Moses Stephen M, Newman Herbert Noble Stephen H. OUn James C. Parrish Charles Peabody F. G. Peabody George Foster Peabody Francis K. Pendleton David H. G. Peany Mrs. R. B. Perry A. E. Phoutrides C. R. Post Wm. KeUv Prentice Walter W'. Price Fleming H. ReveU James S, Roberts John D. RockefeUer, Jr. Herbert L. Satterlee Mortimer Schiff Walter Scott Alex. Sedgwick Miran Sevasly Finley J. Shepard Charles H. SherriU John A. Sleicher KendaU K. Smith R. A. C. Smith Herbert W. Smyth Lispenard Stewart Wm. Rhinelander Stewart Joseph R. Taylor E. C. Travlos WiUiam J. TuUy C. F. Valentine W. H. Van AUen Frank A. Vanderlip Andrew F. West Mrs. CE. Whitmore Louis WUey George T. Wilson P. J. Zachs All COMMtTNICATIONS TO BE ADDRESSED TO THE SECRETARY, ThE AmEBICAN- Hellenic Socibtt, Inc., Col"dmbia Universitt Post-Ofmcb, Substation No. 84. New Yobk.