y line from Persia, which would allow another stretch of
country to be tapped by the German Railway Company. Great Britain,
acknowledging the error of her ways, agreed that Koweit should not be
the terminus and made valuable concessions to the Teuton, the
realization of which was hindered by the outbreak of the war. Turkey,
through Enver, who had imported from the Fatherland a band of military
"instructors" under Liman von Sanders, became the _ame damnee_ of
Germany. In Persia every warlike and predatory tribe was courted by
the Teuton intruder, and the German mission at Teheran, as well as the
Consulates in the chief towns of the Shahdom, became centres of
agitation against Britain and Russia and branches of the German
General Staff.

In the Tsar's dominions German agents organized a series of strikes in
the various works belonging to their countrymen, paid the strikers and
fostered a subversive political movement which bade fair to culminate
in a real revolution. In Belgium the Flemings, who had for years been
protesting against the refusal of their Government to give them a
Flemish University in Ghent, were incited against the Walloons, whose
dialect is of French origin and whose sympathizers were the entire
French people. And one of the joint acts of the German administration
in Brussels has been to appoint a commission to submit a scheme for
the creation of a Flemish high school in Ghent and accentuate the
differences between the two elements of the population.[108]

[108] A spirited protest against this poisonous endeavour was
published by a number of Belgians, including Camille
Huysmans, who refused to accept any favours from the Germans.

Meanwhile, in Germany the work of organization went steadily forward.
While British Ministers were on the look-out for reasons or pretexts
for diminishing expenditure on shipbuilding, Germany, under von
Tirpitz, was stealing a march on us and increasing hers. And over and
above this, she was arranging a surprise in the shape of submarines
and aircraft which, had the war been deferred for another couple of
years, might have not only removed the odds in our favour but given
her a decided superiority over us. And, by way of intensifying the
value of her fleet, she set to work to deepen the Kiel Canal and thus
to confer a sort of ubiquity on her battleships, which can now
concentrate in the North Sea or the Baltic without let or hindrance
from the enemy. When the epo