July 28.
The publication in Germany lof the war diary and letters of Marshal von der Goltz, the high military adviser to the Sultan of Turkey during the early years of the war, great interest to all who anything to do with the fighting, in the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia prior to von der Goltz's death, at the age of 72 in Bagdad, in the early spring of 1916, It seems likely, however,, that if {the discouraged and world-weary old soldier's private papers are going to be of any interest to historians two or three genera. tion's hence it will be chiefly because of one prophetic sentence written at Constantinople and dated October 10, 1916, six months before his death, which reads as follows: "The great movement of the twentieth century will be the revolt of the coloured races against the colonial imperialism of the Europ-
There is nothing in the context to give a clue to von der Goltz's reasons for arriving at this unqualified conclusion two years before the. Bolshevists were advocating class war in the West and race consciousness, in the East and at a time when Germany herself was fighting as much for colonial expansion, with the Near East as. an avenue to it, jas for anything else. The average reader would see nothing remarkable in such a statement to-day, and anyone who assumed prophetic airs while paraphrase ing it would certainly get credit for originality, but this prophesy in 1916, from a man who had been a cog in the Prussian military machine for half century must be regarded as having a really intelligent anticipation of tendencies in Asia based upon the old man's intimate knowledge of Eastern psychology. Knowing Turkey well, he was undoubtedly familiar' even then with the still unorganized Nationalist movement in that country and must have foreseen how it would spread in Asia under the stimulus of war propaganda. He must have understood how the Asiatics would respond to the wide dissemination of the doctrines of self-determination, the rights of weaker nations and the like, as very few statesmen the Occident understand that reaction to-day.
No Occidental politician who! has not come to know the psychology of one of the militarily' weak peoples can hope to understand that the adoption of a benevolent, indulgent, paternally helpful attitude towards them by a militarily superior race or nation is more bitterly resented than conquest and subjugation by force of arms. The amour propre of a people with neither the essential inclination to fight, nor the still more essential ability to organize for war, demands that war be held in contempt and that it be pronounced material and brutal in contrast to veal or imaginary—spiritual hievements. A nation that dislikes a struggle or cannot, learn to defend itself, maintains its self-respect by pretending to despise martial accomplishment and builds up a traditional indifference to its fate in war until it arrives at the point where conquest and government by an alien at the point of the sword is considered a national mishap but not a national dis grace. Such a nation cherishes little if any resentment against the conqueror because it has already persuaded itself that it is compensated for a lack of fighting ability by some sort of spiritual superiority over the conqueror which can by no means be offset by mere force of arms. The, assumption. of a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.