The indignation aroused among some of the Home newspapers—principally, Radical though the "Observer" and the "Sunday Times" also join in the chorus of disapprobation—at being told that the situation in the Midde East is critical, is amazing, after our recent experience of what comes of disregarding unpalatable warnings. The statement which has caused all the pother was published among our Jast. Monday's telegrams, and to any dispassionate view it said no more than what appeared extremely probable. With the Bolsheviks getting down into the Caucasus, with Turkey still ignorant of her fate and in a state of great ferment and with northern Persia, Syria and Egypt all full of inflammable mat-enol, the situation in a district which can infect three continents and is the most difficult region in the world to get at properly is bound to occasion alarm. When we further find that Georgia and Azerbaijan have sent to Paris to ask for help, that the British naval and military chiefs are called to Paris to confer with the Supreme Council and the Mediterranean Fleet been sent from Malta to the Black Sea, we may be pretty sure that the unpopular statement was made advisedly. To talk as the " Westminster" does of the War Office trying to "stampede" public opinion—as if British generals took a malign pleasure in trying to rush the country into war—seems to us not only an insult but a blunder. That is the way Radicals used to speak of Lord Roberts's attempts to awaken the country to the German peril: and as politicians then denounced his wise and true admonitions, so now Mr. Lloyd George has been persuaded to repudiate the warning about the Middle East. What the sense of this burying of heads in the sand is passes comprehension.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.