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He tactfully turned the conversation to Oxford, paying a very high tribute to Mr. Asquith’s brilliant son: “A noble character, highly intelligent and broad-minded. A victim of war we could ill afford to lose!”

Association inevitably led to the question I must have been asked a hundred times during my journey, “Why does Lloyd George hate us so bitterly? How can he admire the Greeks?”

“He knows little of either,” I replied, “nothing, at any rate, from personal observation of them in their own lands. We have first-class Near-East specialists, no doubt; but his chief informants have been nonconformist preachers, even more biassed than he. Nonconformity is the traditional foe of the Turks. Their boasted ‘freedom of thought and conscience’ does not extend to the Servants of the Prophet, and as they once echoed Gladstone, to-day they echo Lloyd George.”

“And in America?” asked the cheik.

“Their church is an advertising agency. They have transformed ‘dissent’ to a ‘trust.’ Go to the States with an idea, and, if it pleases them, they will ‘put it across’ like any other commodity, as a ‘cute’ business proposition. With a colony of two million Greeks, and, maybe, as many Armenians (whose exaggerated and unchecked ‘lamentations’ have full Free-Church support), America will never give Turkey even a fair hearing. You have read their ‘Press’?”