The prolonged negotiations over the concession of the Bagdad railway ensued, the interests of Turkey and Germany alike being repeatedly thwarted by England’s opposition, up to the very eve of the present war, when Sir Edward Grey withdrew our objection, providing only for our interests on the section between Bagdad and the Persian Gulf.[2] During the Young Turk revolution of 1908–1909, English Liberal opinion was enthusiastic in support of the movement and in the expectation of reform. But our diplomacy, always irritated at new situations and suspicious of extended liberties, eyed the change with a chilling scepticism which threw all the advantage into the hands of Baron Marschall von Biberstein, the German Ambassador in Constantinople. His natural politeness and open-hearted industry contrasted favourably with the habitual aloofness or leisured indifference of British Embassies; and so it came about that Enver Pasha, the military leader of Young Turkey, was welcomed indeed by the opponents of Abdul Hamid’s tyranny at a public dinner in London, but went to reside in Berlin as military attaché. [Sidenote: GERMANY’S EASTERN AIMS] Germany’s object in this astute benevolence was not concealed. With her rapidly increasing population, laborious, enterprising, and better trained than other races for the pursuit of commerce and technical industries, she naturally sought outlets to vast spaces of the world, such as Great Britain, France, and Russia had already absorbed. The immense growth of her wealth, combined with formidable naval and military power, encouraged the belief that such expansion was as practicable as necessary. But the best places in the sun were now occupied. She had secured pretty fair portions in Africa, but France, England, and Belgium had better. Brazil was tempting, but the United States proclaimed the Monroe doctrine as a bar to the New World. Portugal might sell Angola under paternal compulsion, but its provinces were rotten with slavery, and its climate poisonous. Looking round the world, Germany found in the Turkish Empire alone a sufficiently salubrious and comparatively vacant sphere for her development; and it is difficult to say what more suitable sphere we could have chosen to allot for her satisfaction, without encroaching upon our own preserves. Even the patch remaining to Turkey in Europe is a fine market-place; with industry and capital most of Asia Minor would again flourish as “the bright cities of Asia” have flourished before; there is no reason but the Ottoman curse why the sites of Nineveh and Babylon should remain uninhabited, or the Garden of Eden lie desolate as a wilderness of alternate dust and quagmire.