Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth].

  • David George Hogarth
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    peoples indistinguishable in type, fighting under the irre- concilable banners of churches which cannot adduce an iota of serious doctrinal variance to explain their schism. What can come of Armenian national aspirations but sporadic enterprises rendered futile and therefore fatal by discord and treachery, while one part of the race, being Catholic, looks to France ; a second being Protestant, to the Anglo- Saxon ; a third is Moslem, and one with the Ottoman ; and the mutual enmities of all three are only equalled in intensity by the reciprocal antagonism of all to the Gregorian residue ? The Syrian groups are in like case, some looking westward, some eastward, but none to the others. Copts, reinforced by the strong element of alien Christians in Lower Egypt, permanently impair the growth of a spirit of national unity in the Nile Valley. And we have seen already what fierce and implacable hostilities divide the world of Islam into two great camps, and how hostilities, more covert but hardly more placable, under- mine, and are likely further to subvert as time goes on, the seeming unities of even the two main armies. If the weak Imperial rulers in Stambul and Teheran have hitherto found security in these divisions, they must set on the other side of the account the fact that no alien Power, which wishes to set foot in their respective empires, will ever lack an invitation or an excuse. Nor is it only as a Debatable Land that the Nearer East has a disquieting influence on the outer world, but also as an Intermediate Land, that is to say, a thoroughfare—the region through which must lie, and by which can be en- dangered, the communications between the West and the West-in-East. It is only in comparatively recent times that it has come to matter so greatly in this respect. For in the process of the change in the significance of its position, the Nearer East, shutting its door jealously against the growing influence of the West, long ceased to play any part in the development of civilisation. But already ere the cutting of the Asiatic isthmus had brought the trunk sea-way of the Old World through its midst, it had accepted its inevitable role. And now, with the con-
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