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 when war was finally declared, Germany's plan of campaign allotted an important role to Turkey not in a possible emergency, but at a date to be determined by the completion of her military and naval equipment.