d every attempt made by Germany's rivals
to push their trade or extend their political relations beyond their
own borders.

This lack of enterprise was especially accentuated in their dealings
with Turkey. No Powers had done so much to uphold Ottoman sway in
Europe as France and Britain, and for a long while their exertions
found their natural outcome in a degree of influence at the Sublime
Porte which was unparalleled in Turkish history. But once Germany
inaugurated her economico-political campaign in the Near East, the
principle of neighbourliness was invoked in favour of allowing her to
possess herself of a share of the good things going, whereupon Great
Britain, and in a lesser degree France, curbed their natural impulse
and left most of the field to the pushing new-comer. For years the
writer of these lines pointed out the danger of this self-abnegation,
but his insistent appeals for a more active line of conduct were met
by the statement that Near Eastern affairs had long ceased to tempt
the enterprise or affect the international policy of Great Britain. As
though Great Britain were not a member of the European community or
her geographical insularity implied political isolation; or as if her
policy of equilibrium were capable of being achieved without the
employment of adequate means! When I raised my voice against our
participation in the Baghdad railway scheme and bared to the light the
political designs underlying it, Cabinet Ministers assured the country
that its scope was exclusively economic and cultural and had no
connection with politics! This naive belief and the _laissez-faire_
attitude which it engendered enabled the Teutons to reduce Turkey to
economic and political thraldom and to earmark Asia Minor,
thenceforward hedged in with the Baghdad and Anatolian railways, as a
future German colony.

The closeness and constancy of the relations between economics and
politics which easily took root in German consciousness, had for
another of its corollaries the dispatch of General Liman von Sanders
and his band of officers to reorganize the Ottoman army. This measure
struck some observers as the beginning of the end of European peace.
It was thus that the Russian Premier, Kokofftseff, and his colleague,
Sazonoff, construed it, and that was the interpretation which I also
put upon it. But none of the other interested Governments expressed
similar misgivings, nor, so far as one can judge, entertained any. Yet