"The Turkish statesmen, vacillating in council from day to day, allowed their true interests to be Lurmng to financial and economic quesuons, sir, Asquith explained vue measures taken by the Govern ment to deal with the abnormal situation at the beginning of the war, He thought that tne results were very satisfactory. Horeign exchanges were working, in the case of most countries, quite satistactorily. The Gold Heserves in the Bank of England, which amounted 440,000,000 on July 28 and which bad fallen on August 7 to £27,000,000 now stood at the unprecedented figure of £69,000,000. (Cheers.) The Central Gold Reserve, after three months' war, amounted to £80,000,- 000, or almost exactly twice the amount at which it stood at the be ginning of the crisis, Mr. Asquith pointed out that the bank rate, after fluctuations, was about the level at which it had been this time last year. Food prices had been kept on a fairly normal level and, though trade had beea curtailed in "some directions, unem ployment had been rather below than above the average. In this connexion the Premier paid a tribute to the ce-operation of city fin-anders in relieving the situation and announced that His Majesty the King, in recognition of those services, had conferred a peerage on Mr. Walter Cunliffe, the Governor of the Bank of England. undermined by German threats, by German gold. They were tempted to one futile outrage after another. The lawless bombardment of Russian open porte, equally with a lawless incursion into Egyptian territory, continued until the Allies, after observing unexampled patience in the face of veiled menaces and impudent equivocations, were compelled to yield to the logic of facts and to recognize the Turk as an open enemy. It is not the Turkish people, it is the Ottoman Government that has drawn the sword, and I do not hesitate to predict that that Government will perish by the sword. It is they and not we who have rung the death knell of the Ottoman Donot only in Europe, but With this disappearance of Turkey will disappear, as I hope and believe, a blight which, for generations past, has withered some of the fairest regions of the world.
"We have no quarrel with the Mussulman subjects of the Eultan. Our Sovereign claims among his most loyal subjects millions of men of the Moslem faith. Nothing is
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.