CHAPTER II

STRATEGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

So far I have been considering the future of Constantinople only in times of peace, and I have attempted to show that in such times the interests of all nations would be protected and furthered by the Straits being placed under international administration, and that the constitution

of an

International Commission for that purpose is not only desirable but practicable. The question which I have reserved for this chapter is whether in times of war the interests of the world and of the individual nations will best be protected and advanced by leaving the Straits in the exclusive possession of a single Power or by placing it under

international administration. In the remainder of the book I shall therefore be concerned with that dangerous and elusive subject, strategical considerations, a subject which has probably produced more false prophets and prophecies than any other dignified with the name of a science.

The ordinary man is encouraged to think that people who believe in the desirability and possibility of international government have a monopoly of utopianism. But any history book will show that the desires and ideals of militarists, imperialists, and extreme nationalists are much more fantastically impossible than those of the internationalist. History is strewn with the wreckage, not of international but of imperial and national utopias. The most striking difference between the imperialist's and the internationalist's ideal is that the world has allowed the former to attempt to put his

ideal into practice, while refusing even to give a trial to the ideal of the latter. The reason is not difficult to find. The glitter of pure romance is to most people far more attractive than the drab dullness

of plain working facts. Ninety-nine persons will follow with breathless interest the ridiculous utopian ceremonies of the puppet court of a puppet twentieth-century king for one who will find anything to interest him in the solid and practical, but extremely dull, proceedings of a Borough Council. To most people, as the preceding pages will prove to them, the functions and work of an European Commission of the Danube are portentously boring that is because they embody an extremely practical ideal. The man who wants romance and excitement knows that the surest way of getting what he wants is to call all such practical ideals utopian, and he has dealt in this way very successfully with internationalism. Mean

while diplomatists, kaisers, war-lords, and every kind of nationalist and imperialist have been given carte blanche by the millions of plain men and women to construct, out of their bodies and lives, systems based upon nothing nothing but the dreams and hallucinations and deliriums of a madhouse. There were two great international reconstructions of Europe in the nineteenth century, one through the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and the other through the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Both of them embodied the ideas and desires of military men and imperialistic nationalists, and both of them fell to pieces almost instantly like card houses. They were, in fact, nothing but the utopias of practical men, and they have suffered the fate of all utopias. The longsuffering credulity of the ordinary man is one of the most astonishing phenomena in history. Louis XIV, Napoleon, Metternich, and Bismarck, to take only four

examples at random, were all allowed to use hundreds of thousands of ordinary men for the purpose of putting their ideals into practice. And each time the ordinary men said to themselves (and still say): "These be Great Men, Practical Men. They see Things As They Are. They show us the way to Reality and Realpolitik !' Yet a few years sufficed to prove Louis XIV a visionary, Metternich an impossible crank, and Napoleon a dreamer of unattainable dreams, while the moment in this war seems to be rapidly drawing near when the little reality in the Realpolitik of Bismarck will become apparent.

If Constantinople is settled by placing it in the hands of one State or nation, it will be settled solely on imperialist and militarist lines. No nation has a shadow of a national claim to it. In peace, as I have shown, no nation could have a shadow of an economic claim to it, if