PLAIN WARNING TO TURKEY. NO MORE SHILLYSHALLYING.

DANGER OF NEW WAR.

An incident of some significance took place this morning. In itself it was of small moment – being merely the insertion of a clause that the Turks should be bound to apply to the sanitary coastal regime the proceeds of all sanitary dues levied, both upon foreign and Turkish vessels. But when it is added that this condition was suggested by a Turk its importance is manifest. For it represents the one and only proposal limiting the discretion of the Turkish Government for the benefit of Turkey as a World-power which has been put forward during either Conference by any Ottoman delegate. When some impartial pen shall set itself to allot responsibility for the long delays of these negotiations, for the first breakdown in February, and possibly for a second and final failure in the near future, due weight will be given to this illuminating fact. Yet outside Lausanne there are probably not fifty persons in Europe who have realised it.

But the significance of the occasion does not end here. It was the irreconcilable Riza Nur and no other who made the suggestion. Now, within the last week it has become more and more apparent that the Turks are growing seriously uneasy at the course which events are taking, both inside the Conference and outside it. Mustapha Kemal and Ismet Pasha are no doubt in earnest in wishing for a peace. It is only a soldier who can know how fatal a resumption of the war would be for Turkey. Yet every day Ismet moves one step nearer war. His blind belief that Turkey’s past record should give foreigners every confidence in the incorruptibility, justice, and capacity of her future Administration bids fair to be his country’s undoing. He does not recognise that Turkey’s attempt to liquidate her old debts in paper worth one-seventh of its face value is scarcely distinguishable from theft. He does not see that the action of the Ottoman Government in raiding Greek banks at this crisis has gone far to disillusion the most infatuate of Turcophiles. Above all, he has failed to understand that the whole conduct of these negotiations from start to finish has convinced the world that not by a hair’s-breadth has the nature of the Turk changed during the last fifteen years. It is only right to add that the misgivings of foreigners are doubled by the remembrance that it is one of the straightest of Turks who fails thus to understand the elements of the situation.