Art. 13.-TURKEY IN THE GRIP OF GERMANY.

WITH a singular lapse into veracity the German Imperial Chancellor stated in his opening speech to the Reichstag on Dec. 1, that 'the most recent ally in battle who has been compelled to join us is the Ottoman Empire.' Never perhaps has a country taken sides in a war, from which all its interests bade it hold aloof, under such ruthless compulsion as that which was exerted upon Turkey by Germany and the small group of reckless adventurers who govern Turkey at her bidding. After three months of constant prevarication and gross breaches of neutrality endured by England and her Allies with unexampled patience and leniency, the rulers of Turkey threw off the mask at Germany's behest; and, whilst Turkish raiders invaded Egyptian territory, Turkish men-of-war, under German command, opened fire without a word of warning on undefended Russian ports in the Black Sea. The appearance of the Goeben' and the Breslau 'in Constantinople vaters after their escape from the Mediterranean, and the constant stream of German officers and German gold which poured into Turkey throughout September and October, no doubt played a great part in hastening on the final catastrophe. But, if the match was then set to the train, the train itself had been carefully laid by Germany for many years past. Indeed it had been laid by the Emperor William himself, when just sixteen years before, after paying a state visit to the Sultan Abdul Hamid at Constantinople, he ostentatiously proclaimed himself at Damascus, on Nov. 7, 1898, the protector, not only of Turkey, but of the whole Mahomedan world. In a speech which fell on strangely indifferent ears in Europe, but was carried far and wide along the whispering galleries of the East, William II declared that His Majesty the Sultan and the 30,000,000 Mahomedans who, scattered over all parts of the earth, venerate him as their Khalif can ever rely upon the friendship of the German Empero:.' It was, except in point of time, but a short step from that pronouncement to the telegram in which William II conveyed the other day to the Crown Prince the glad ticings that the Sheik-ul-Islam at Constantinople had proclaimed the Jehad or Holy War against the Allied Powers.

Of all the various developments of the Kaiser's 'world-policy' in which, as I pointed out in the October issue of the 'Quarterly Review,' the origins of the present war must be sought, none has been so decisive a factor as the peculiar relationship which grew up between Turkey and Germany under his auspices. None also marked a wider departure from German policy under Bismarck.

After the Franco-German war of 1871 the main object of Bismarck's policy was to consolidate the position he had achieved for the new German Empire, and above all to avert the possibility of any hostile combination of Powers against Germany. What he would have preferred, and what he sought for some years not unsuccessfully to secure, was a close understanding between the three great military Empires of Central and Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria and Russia. But the 'Three Emperors' Alliance' broke down under the strain of the disturbances in the Balkan Peninsula in 1875 and 1876, and of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. After the Congress of Berlin, when the manner in which Bismarck discharged his duties as an honest broker' almost inevitably gave umbrage to Russia, he decided, rather reluctantly, to make a close alliance with Austria the corner-stone of his policy. But he remained none the less determined to avoid being dragged into a conflict with Russia, especially over questions connected with the Near East, where his chief concern was to preserve a dexterous equilibrium between the contending ambitions of Russia and Austria. German diplomacy had hitherto played a very modest part in Constantinople itself; and he realised that Germany could not fill the preponderating part which he contemplated unless she secured for herself there a position of more substantial authority.

Circumstances soon favoured him beyond his own expectations. British intervention had saved Constantinople from occupation by the victorious Russian armies at the close of the Russo-Turkish war; and, so long as Lord Beaconsfield's Government remained in power, British influence prevailed almost unchallenged in Turkey. But with the advent of Mr Gladstone's administration in 1880 the situation was suddenly and completely changed. Even if the Sultan had been willing to forget

the Midlothian campaign, the attitude which the new British Government immediately assumed in regard to the Greek and Montenegrin questions, of which the settlement under the Berlin Treaty still remained in suspense, quickly convinced the Turks that they could no longer reckon upon British support.

Bismarck at once saw his opportunity. Germany stepped into the place which we had vacated as the 'disinterested' friend of Turkey; and, in all the international negotiations of which Constantinople was then the pivot, she laid herself out not only to mitigate differences between Austria and Russia, but also to capture the confidence of the Sultan by a discreet championship of Turkish interests, which gratified his amour propre, without compromising in any way her own freedom of action. One good turn deserves another. In return for Germany's diplomatic countenance, the Sultan asked for a German military mission to reorganise and equip the Turkish army on the Teutonic model; and he delighted to bestow his patronage on German rather than on British or French trade and industry. Young Turkish officers were sent to receive their technical education in Germany; German bankers opened branch offices in Constantinople and found lucrative investments for the Sultan's Privy Purse. Germany's voice began to carry more weight than any other in the Turkish capital. But Bismarck never forgot that the part he wished to play at Constantinople could only be played safely and successfully if it were generally recognised that Germany had no territorial ambitions in the Near East, and that, as he once put it, the Balkan peninsula would never be considered 'worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.'

It was upon these lines that German policy in Constantinople continued to move so long as Bismarck was in power. But they were lines too modest to satisfy William II.

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The idea that the German race would some day find a Promised Land in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia was itself far older than William II's schemes for a World Empire.' It had floated in many a German mind long before the Hohenzollerns revived an imperial Germany under Prussian auspices. The great Moltke, who in his

youth had accompanied the Turkish armies during the wars against Mehemet Ali, had brought back with him the conviction that the Turkish Empire was doomed to perish, and that Germany-meaning at that time Austria as the premier State of the old Germanic Confederacyought to be in at the death. It was essential for her to hold the mouths of the Danube, for down the valley of that great German river lay the road to Constantinople and Western Asia. The revolutionary movement which swept over Germany in 1848 produced a curious wave of sentimental Pan-Germanism; and, even earlier, democratic writers of many different schools, Friedrich List and Lassalle, Ritter and Oppert, dreamed of German homesteads repeopling and cultivating the ancient kingdoms of Nineveh and Babylon.

This, however, was only the 'false dawn' of modern and militant Pan-Germanism. It was not till the paramount position which the new German Empire had acquired on the European continent ceased to satisfy the growing appetite of a later generation, that the Germans began to 'hear the East a'calling.' The Professors as usual led the way. Dr Sprenger, a distinguished Orientalist, sang the praises of Mesopotamia as the richest land of ancient times and a field for German colonisation and culture second to none in the world. Dr Kärger laid hands metaphorically on the whole of Asiatic Turkey; and, as soon as the Sultan conceded to the Germans the construction of the first Anatolian' railway, the cry was raised that Germany must of course obtain grants of land for colonising purposes, so that 100,000 German settlers, armed and drilled with true German thoroughness, should be there to defend the fruits of German culture against foreign greed. The economists expatiated on the vast natural resources of Asiatic Turkey, waiting only to be developed for the benefit of German commerce and industry-corn and wine; great mineral deposits; vast oil-fields to be tapped, right down to the Persian Gulf; fertile plains which would yield all the cotton required for the German market. Anglophobe politicians talked of a ‘new India' for Germany, which would give the deathblow to British India, already tottering to its fall. Military fire-eaters were assured by Prof. Sachau that it was the dream of every Turk to see the Ottoman

armies led by German officers, schooled to victory, against the hereditary Russian foe. A fair-sized bookstand would not hold the literature which has sprung up to show the boundless possibilities that lay before Germany if she would only stretch forth her hand to grasp the prize.

William II's imagination had not, perhaps, travelled quite so far when he came to the throne, but, even as Prince William, he had keenly studied the reports which reached Berlin from the energetic head of the German Military Mission, General von der Goltz, who was one of the earliest advocates of a forward German policy in Turkey-the same General von der Goltz who as Field Marshal has now returned to Constantinople to represent the German Emperor with his latest ally, Sultan Mahomet V.

Within a year of his accession, William II decided, against Bismarck's advice, to pay a State visit to Constantinople. It was a remarkable and a fateful visit, for it gave rise to one of the first serious differences of opinion between the old Chancellor and his young sovereign, and it brought him into immediate contact with an Oriental ruler whose singular personality exerted a lasting influence upon him. We are apt to remember only Abdul Hamid's inglorious downfall and to forget the remarkable part he played during a reign of over thirty-two years. Yet his sinister shadow is still projected on to the world's stage to-day.

Raised to the throne in 1876 by one of many palace conspiracies, Abdul Hamid found the Ottoman Empire reduced to absolute bankruptcy by the wild extravagance of his predecessors, and threatened both by internal turmoil and by foreign aggression. The insurrection in Bosnia and Herzegovina had led to a war with Serbia, itself merely the precursor of a much more formidable and disastrous war with Russia. Without any education in the European sense of the term and with no experience of public affairs, Abdul Hamid found himself confronted with a situation which might well have staggered a veteran statesman. His immediate predecessors had allowed all real power to pass out of their hands, so long as the Pashas who ruled the Empire from the Sublime Porte were willing to minister freely to the Imperial pleasures and caprices. But he believed in his own star