The conference resumed its sessions at Lausanne on April 22 in an atmosphere that had not changed during the recess. Quite the contrary! During the fortnight preceding the reopening, several events had complicated the diplomatic situation in the Near East. The Greeks had seemingly been able to reconstitute an army of 100,000, mobilized on the Thracian frontier. On April 15 the deposed sultan, who, through British aid, had gone to the Hedjaz, issued a proclamation from Mecca, declaring null and void the decree of the Angora Assembly, deposing him from the double office of sultan and khalif and naming a new khalif. On April 10 the Turkish Government announced that it had granted a sweeping concession in Asia Minor to a supposedly American group, headed by Admiral Chester, U. S. Navy, retired. More than a thousand miles of railways, with ports, and a modern city at Angora, were to be built by the Chester group at an estimated cost of $300,000,000, in return for which the right to minerals and oil was granted the Americans from Mosul to Samsun, a country believed to be abounding in undeveloped wealth. Although the Chester group did not seem to have financial backing to cope with a concession of this magnitude, and was not taken seriously by financiers in New York, London, and Paris, the French Government made a vigorous protest, through General Pellé at Constantinople, refusing to recognize the validity of the part of the concession relating to the railway outlet to the Black Sea. The French claimed that the Samsun Railway concession had already been granted to a French group in 1914, before the outbreak of the war, in return for a loan on which heavy instalments had been paid by Paris to Constantinople. The British Government declared that Turkey had no authority to grant a concession involving the oil and minerals and projected railways of the Mosul region. The feeling aroused over the Chester concession, and the subsequent attempt of British and French bankers to have it set aside and a trade monopoly in Asia Minor granted to them, indicated that the negotiators of the Entente Powers at Lausanne were primarily representing the commercial interests of their countries. The Turks fished so well in these troubled waters that they secured many more modifications of the proposed treaty--until it came to the point that Mustafa Kemal Pasha, through the greed of the European Powers, was securing their acquiescence on every point that did not involve directly their pocketbooks. Only on the capitulations--or rather the underlying principle of the capitulations--did the Entente Powers hold out. They wanted some sort of protection for foreign business interests in Turkey. France waived every moral issue. She stood firm only on the one point that French holders of the Ottoman public debt should receive interest in gold, not paper as the Turks insisted.