Its
communication cut by a naval blockade, the Empire would almost without
further action be dissolved. Whatever loyalty the Sultan may have lately
achieved outside his dominions, there is not only no spirit of national
resistance in Asia Minor itself, but the provinces, even the most
Mussulman, would hail an invading army as a welcome deliverer from him.
Left to themselves they would abandon without compunction the Sultan's
cause, and the next war of an European state with Turkey will not only
be her last, but it will in all likelihood hardly be fought out by her.
Nor do I conceive that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the annexation
of its Turkish provinces would be a mere political loss of so much
territory to Islam. It would involve moral consequences far greater than
this for the whole Mussulman world of North-Western Asia. I have the
authority of the most enlightened of modern Asiatic statesmen in support
of my opinion that it would be the certain deathblow of Mohammedanism as
a permanent religious faith in all the lands west of the Caspian, and
that even among the Tartar races of the far East, the Sunite Mussulmans
of Siberia and the Khanates, and as far as the Great Wall of China, it
would be a shock from which Sunism in its present shape would with
difficulty recover.
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