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tinent. In 1840 Crete entered an epoch of insurrections, its predominantly Greek population carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the Turkish authorities, much as the population of Cuba did against Spain, and for very similar reasons. To bring this period of insurrection to an end, Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy the four chief powers of the present Entente-intervened in 1898, as the United States, in the same year, intervened in Cuba, and constituted Crete an autonomous State, with a nominal suzerainty of Turkey, but with no tribute payable to the Sultan. Cuba, liberated in the same year, had been almost two centuries longer under the yoke-from its discovery by Columbus.

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Beginning with 1906 the four powers recognized certain interests of the Kingdom of Greece in Crete, and the local gendarmerie was organized under Greek officers. Two years later, in 1908, Crete declared for annexation by Greece, but this claim was not admitted by Turkey until the close of the first Balkan war, in 1912. The treaty of peace between Greece and Turkey, which was signed on Nov. 14, 1913, formally made Crete a part of Greece, and this incorporation was recognized by the four powers. After less than three years the situation is again changed. Crete declares herself once more autonomous, and the four powers announce their recognition of that autonomy.

"Grey's Elegy"

HEN Sir Edward Grey sent to neutral Governments on July 7 the text of the "Maritime Rights Order in Council, 1916," (printed on Page 792 of August CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE,) he also sent out the following memorandum-" Grey's Elegy," the London papers called it-in which the British and French Governments explained their action:

At the beginning of the present war the allied Governments, in their anxiety to regulate their conduct by the principles of the law of nations, believed that in the Declaration of London they would find a suitable digest of principles and compendium of working rules. They accordingly decided to adopt the provisions of the Declaration, not as in itself possessing for them the force of law, but because it seemed to present in its main lines a statement of the rights and the duties of belligerents based on the experience of previous naval wars. As the present struggle developed, acquiring a range and character beyond all previous conceptions, it became clear that the attempt made at London in time of peace to determine, not only the principles of law, but even the forms under which they were to be applied, had not produced a wholly satisfactory result. As a matter of fact, these rules, while not in all respects improving the safeguards afforded to neutrals, do not provide belligerents with the most effective means of exercising their admitted rights.

As events progressed, the Germanic powers put forth all their ingenuity to relax the pressure tightening about them and to reopen a channel for supplies; their de

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The allied Governments were forced to recognize the situation thus created, and to adapt the rules of the Declaration from time to time to meet these changing conditions.

These successive modifications may, perhaps, have exposed the purpose of the Allies to misconstruction; they have therefore come to the conclusion that they must confine themselves simply to applying the historic and admitted rules of the law of nations.

The Allies solemnly and unreservedly declare that the action of their warships, no less than the judgments of their prize courts, will continue to conform to these principles; that they will faithfully fulfill their engagements, and in particular will observe the terms of all international conventions regarding the laws of war; that, mindful of the dictates of humanity, they repudiate utterly all thought of threatening the lives of noncombatants; that they will not without cause interfere with neutral property; and that if they should, by the action of their fleets, cause damage to the interests of any merchant acting in good faith, they will always be ready to consider his claims and to grant him such redress as may be due.

By H. G. Wells

The Noted Novelist

This remarkable letter is from Mr. Wells's latest novel, "Mr. Britling Sees It Through," (the Macmillan Company,) which is regarded by many critics as his masterpiece. Mr. Britling, an English father who has lost his son in the war, is addressing the German parents of his son's former tutor, of whose death he has just learned. The letter is assumed to represent the mature views of Mr. Wells and of an influential group of English intellectuals.

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EAR SIR: I am writing this letter to you to tell you I am sending back the few little things I had kept for your son at his request when the war broke out. Especially I am sending his violin, which he had asked me thrice to convey to you. Either it is a gift from you or it symbolized many things for him that he connected with home and you. I will have it packed with particular care, and I will do all in my power to insure its safe arrival.

I want to tell you that all the stress and passion of this war have not made us forget our friend, your son. He was one of us, he had our affection, he had friends here who are still his friends. We found him honorable and

-me, and he, too, has been killed in this war. They are, you see, smiling very pleasantly at each other.

If you think that these two boys have both perished, not in some noble cause

H. G. WELLS

companionable, and we share something of your loss. I have got together for you a few snapshots I chance to possess in which you will see him in the sunshine, and which will enable you, perhaps, to picture a little more definitely than you would otherwise do the life he led here. There is one particularly that I have marked. Our family is lunching out of doors, and you will see that next to your son is a youngster, a year or so his junior, who is touching glasses with him. I have put a cross over his head. He is my eldest son; he was very dear to

but one against the other in a struggle of dynasties and boundaries and trade routes and tyrannous ascendencies, then it seems to me that you must feel as I feel that this war is the most tragic and dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind.

If you count dead and wounds this is the most dreadful war in history; for you as for me, it has been almost the extremity of personal tragedy.

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I can write to you and tell you that I do indeed believe that our two sons have died not altogether in vain. Our pain and anguish may not be wasted -may be necessary. Indeed, they may be necessary. Here am I bereaved and wretched-and I hope. Never was the fabric of war so black; that I admit. But never was the black fabric of war so threadbare. At a thousand points the light is shining through.

War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through

some gleams of light, and now-I am not dreaming-it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through. We owe it to all these dear youths.

Our boys have died, fighting one against the other. They have been fighting upon an issue so obscure that your German press is still busy discussing what it was. For us it was that Belgium was invaded and France in danger of destruction. Nothing else could have brought the English into the field against you. But why you invaded Belgium and France and whether that might have been averted we do not know to this day. And still this war goes on and still more boys die, and these men who do not fight, these men in the newspaper offices and in the Ministries plan campaigns and strokes and counterstrokes that belong to no conceivable plan at all. Except that now for them there is something more terrible than war. And that is the day of reckoning with their own people.

What have we been fighting for? What are we fighting for? Do you know? Does any one know? Why am I spending what is left of my substance and you what is left of yours to keep on this war against each other? What have we to gain from hurting one another still further? Why should we be puppets any longer in the hands of crowned fools and witless diplomatists? Even if we were dumb and acquiescent before, does not the blood of our sons now cry out to us that this foolery should cease? We have let these people send our sons to death.

It is you and I who must stop these wars, these massacres of boys.

Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war. The killing off of the young. It is the destruction of the human inheritance, it is the spending of all the life and material of the future upon present-day hate and greed. Fools and knaves, politicians, tricksters, and those who trade on the suspicions and thoughtless, generous angers of men, make wars; the indolence and modesty of the mass of men permit them. Are you and I to suffer such things until the whole fabric of our civilization, that has

been so slowly and so laboriously built up, is altogether destroyed?

When I sat down to write to you I had meant only to write to you of your son and mine. But I feel that what can be said in particular of our loss need not be said; it can be understood without saying. What needs to be said and written about is this, that war must be put an end to and that nobody else but you and me and all of us can do it. We have to do that for the love of our sons and our race and all that is human. War is no longer human; the chemist and the metallurgist have changed all that. My boy was shot through the eye; his brain was blown to pieces by some man who never knew what he had done. Think what that means! It is plain to me, surely it is plain to you and all the world, that war is now a mere putting of the torch to explosives that flare out to universal ruin. There is nothing for one sane man to write to another about in these days but the salvation of mankind from war.

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Now, I want you to be patient with me and hear me out. There was a time in the earlier part of this war when it was hard to be patient because there hung over us the dread of losses and disaster. Now we need dread no longer. The dreaded thing has happened. Sitting together as we do in spirit beside the mangled bodies of our dead, surely we can be as patient as the hills.

I want to tell you quite plainly and simply that I think that Germany, which is chief and central in this war, is most to blame for this war. Writing to you as an Englishman to a German and with war still being waged, there must be no mistake between us upon this point. I am persuaded that in the decade that ended with your overthrow of France in 1871 Germany turned her face toward evil, and that her refusal to treat France generously and to make friends with any other great power in the world is the essential cause of this war. Germany triumphed—and she trampled on the loser. She inflicted intolerable indignities. She set herself to prepare for further aggressions; long before this killing began she was making war upon land and

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sea, launching warships, building strategic railways, setting up a vast establishment of war material, threatening, straining all the world to keep pace with her threats. * At last there was no choice before any European nation but submission to the German will, or war. And it was no will to which righteous men could possibly submit. It came as an illiberal and ungracious will. It was

the will of Zabern. It is not as if you had set yourselves to be an imperial people and embrace and unify the world. You did not want to unify the world. You wanted to set the foot of an intensely national Germany, a sentimental and illiberal Germany, a Germany that treasured the portraits of your ridiculous Kaiser and his litter of sons, a Germany wearing uniform, reading black letter, and despising every Kultur but her own, upon the neck of a divided and humiliated mankind. It was an intolerable prospect. I had rather the whole world died.

Forgive me for writing "you." You are as little responsible for that Germany as I am for-Sir Edward Grey. But this happened over you; you did not do your utmost to prevent it-even as England has happened, and I have let it happen

over me.

When I bring these charges against Germany I have little disposition to claim any righteousness for Britain. There has been small splendor in this war for either Germany or Britain or Russia; we three have chanced to be the biggest of the combatants, but the glory lies with invincible France. It is France and Belgium and Serbia who shine as the heroic lands. They have fought defensively, and beyond all expectation, for dear land and freedom. This war for them has been a war of simple, definite issues, to which they have risen with an entire nobility. Englishman and German ́alike may well envy them that simplicity. I look to you, as an honest man schooled by the fierce lessons of this war, to meet me in my passionate desire to see France, Belgium, and Serbia emerge restored from all this blood and struggle, enlarged to the limits of their nationality, vindicated and secure. Russia I will not write about here, let me go on at once to tell you

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Politically the British Empire is a clumsy collection of strange accidents. It is a thing as little to be proud of as the outline of a flint or the shape of a potato. For the mass of English people India and Egypt and all that side of our system mean less than nothing; our trade is something they do not understand, our imperial wealth something they do not share. Britain has been a group of four democracies caught in the net of a vast yet casual imperialism; the common man here is in a state of political perplexity from the cradle to the grave. None the less there is a great people here even as there is a great people in Russia, a people with a soul and character of its own, a people of unconquerable kindliness and with a peculiar genius, which still struggle toward will and expression. We have been beginning that same great experiment that France and America and Switzerland and China are making—the experiment of democracy. It is the newest form of human association, and we are still but half awake to its needs and necessary conditions. For it is idle to pretend that the little city democracies of ancient times were comparable to the great essays in practical republicanism that mankind is making today. This age of the democratic republics that dawn is a new age. It has not yet lasted for a century, not for a paltry hundred years.

* * All new things are weak things; a rat can kill a man-child with ease; the greater the destiny, the weaker the immediate self-protection may be. And to me it seems that your complete and perfect imperialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is in its scope and outlook a more antiquated and smaller

and less noble thing than these sprawling emergent giant democracies of the West that struggle so confusedly against it. *

But that we do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit. At the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see militarism felled within a year. *

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I do not think you Germans realize how steadily you were conquering the world before this war began. Had you given half the energy and intelligence you have spent upon this war to the peaceful conquest of men's minds and spirits, I believe that you would have taken the leadership of the world tranquilly-no man disputing. Your science was five years, your social and economic organization was a quarter of a century in front of ours. 串 * ** Never has it so lain in the power of a great people to lead and direct mankind toward the world republic and universal peace. It needed but a certain generosity of the imagination. **

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But your Junkers, your Imperial Court, your foolish vicious Princes; what were such dreams to them? * * * With an envious satisfaction they hurled all

the accomplishment of Germany into the fires of war.

Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamed constantly of such a world peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his country. He could envisage war and hostility only as misunderstanding. He thought that a world that could explain itself clearly would surely be at peace. He was scheming always therefore for the perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such universal link. My youngster, too, was full of a kindred and yet larger dream, the dream of human science, which knows neither King nor country

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Paying the Price for Citizenship

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Eden Phillpotts, the English novelist, voices the present British war spirit in the closing passage of his latest book, "The Green Alleys," in these words: That's why I ask for conscription, to help the young men see they can't have anything for nothing. * * To be content to be an Englishman and take the privilege as a matter of course: What an insult to your mother! It is something to look around the world and be English today. And it will be something bigger still a year hence. Too big a thing, indeed, to take for nothing -surely a thing to strengthen a man's mind with reverence and quicken his heart with pride. * * Everybody's up against it today, from God on his throne to the smallest girl-child sewing buttons on a soldier's coat. We're recasting the whole world in the crucible of this war, and if it's the Almighty's master-work to see that the new-born earth shall roll sweeter and wiser through His heaven afterward, it's ours, to the least of us, to help stoke the furnace fires and purge the dross from the melting pot.

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