Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1920-06-15
Universal Discomfort With Turkish
Treaty

treaty
1t is hard to discover who, in
Europe, is pleased with the Turkish
treaty. Greece, apparently, has the
best reason to be satisfied, although
certain of the most indisputably
the bigger powers. Italy is disil-
| lusioned. British opinion, both Lib
eral and Conservative, ridicules the
pact. The French view is tersely
summed up in the bald statement Of
La Liberte:
! interests in the east was sc per cent,
and that of England s per cent.
| The Turkish treaty grants to Eng
| land 2,S50,000 square kilometers
| (about 100000 square miles) or
eight times the areas of Great Brit
ain.
Syria, left to France, is equivalent
to one-thirty-fifth of the British
share.
The London Nation-old standby of
| the British advertisements acidly
| that it is "a nice question whether
| the Turkish treaty is the worst of
| the SERIES" but that in any case ''it
| is the least likely to stand the test
| Of time" OF the four salient points
Cd Observation-Disclosures of the straits
~ ACKNOWLEDGMENT of Greece 90
severance of Arabic lands from Tur-
key, and ca subsection of the re-
mainder of Turkey to permanent al
| lied control, the Nation finds that
i the first, three are more or less
| fulfilled" but 1.-The last may remain
| indefinitely on paper" 1t points out
that all Turkish Turkey us in re-
volt and that everywhere except IN
| Constantinople and Smyrna the hold
of the allies is precarious. "The
treaty, as Signor Nitti said, cannot
H. NIT Tan
Asia Minor, and who will wage it?'
The Nation also complains that the
League of Nationseis left in the back
ground, with the sole power OF de-
termining blockade of the straits,
while the administration of the treaty
is left to a separate commission
| which excludes not only the central
powers but the neutrals. Moreover,
'it is not edifying to find that Italy
| will keep Rhodes and the Dodecanese,
while we Keep Cyprus; these are
cacially Greek lands" Then there
is Armenia, whose boundaries are
left to President Wilson's decision
"But if he agrees and fixes bound.
aries, who is to drive out the Turks!"
the Nation asks.
The Conservative London Outlook
Is hardly less despairing.. "A sta
BILE treaty, it says is usually a
! the present instance, the local Cir
cumstances perhaps in any case were
bar to complete stability, but that
being granted, the general principles
actuating the settlement are equally
shy of discoYery-unless one sug-
gests that the general principle was
that each of the victorious powers
should take precisely what it wanted,
only leaving to the loser what no
body wanted, or to the League OF
Nations what every body wanted SO
much that they could trust nobody
else to administer is, as in the case
of Constantinpole; or to the United
States-Which refused the gift at any
price-a territory like Armenia,
whose aspirations everybody ap-
plauded and whose administration ev-
erybody repudiates; with suspicious
unanimity that one would like to as
cribe to altruism, did not the arts
of the treaty rather emphatlcaily
contradict the existence of that rar-
est of virtues in international pol
And as for the League Of Nations
in this connection, the Outlook notes
that it was originally devised as a
kind of gateway to better world,
and a symbolic portal to a palace OF
peace. 1t is gradually being trans
formed into a dustbin."
One unfortunate certainty comes
out of it all, the Outlook observes
mournfully:
The rivalry between Greece and
Italy is not matter of yesterday;
and the secular jealousy which di-
vided the Roman Empire, and ranged
Rome and Constantinople against
each other for a thousand years, is
not yet extinct. Nor will the terms
of the treaty help to diminish that
ancient feud. There was a time. when
Italy entered the war, when her
rather large Levantine ambitions
seemed like to be gratified much more
generously. Those ambitious are,
perhaps, larger than she could JUS
tify otherwise than on the grounds
of patriotic faith in her destiny; but
the fruition has been correspondence
small. both on the eastern side of
the Adriatic and in Asia Minor. The
fact that Greece has been accorded
rather more than her deserts and It.
ally rather less will not in the least
diminish the old tension between the
two countries, and statesmen with
European vision will do we'll to reck-
on with this fact as a permanent ele-
ment in the general situation.
Greece's disproportionate share of
the booty is also a surprise to the
London Saturday Review. 1t says:
Thrace, Gallipoli and Smyrna are
pretty good wages to the power that
fatty refused to meet its treaty obli-
cations to Serbia when attacked by
Bulgaria at the beginning of the war,
and whose ambiguous attitude for the
/ first two years caused US a great