Astride across Europe and Asia, the Ottoman Empire represented, for all the nations of the old continent, the cosmopolitan centre where each had erected, by dint of patience and ingenuity, a fortress of interests, influences, and special rights. Each fortress watched jealously to maintain its particular advantages in face of the rival enemy. If one of them obtained a concession, or a new favour, immediately the commanders of the others were seen issuing from their walls to claim from the Grand Turk concessions or favours which should maintain the existing balance of power or prestige.... France acted as protector of the Christians; England, the vigilant guardian of the routes to India, maintained a privileged political and economic position; Austria-Hungary mounted guard over the route to Salonica; Russia, protecting the Armenians and Slavs of the South of Europe, watched over the fate of the Orthodox. There was a general understanding among them all, tacit or express, that none should better its situation at the expense of the others. When into this precariously balanced system of conflicting interests Germany began to throw her weight, the necessary result was a disturbance of equilibrium. As early as 1839 German ambition had been directed towards this region by Von Moltke; but it was not till 1873 that the process of "penetration" began. In that year the enterprise of the Anatolian railway was launched by German financiers. In the succeeding years it extended itself as far as Konia; and in 1899 and 1902 concessions were obtained for an extension to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. It was at this point that the question became one of international politics. Nothing could better illustrate the lamentable character of the European anarchy than the treatment of this matter by the interests and the Powers affected. Here had been launched on a grandiose scale a great enterprise of civilization. The Mesopotamian plain, the cradle of civilization, and for centuries the granary of the world, was to be redeemed by irrigation from the encroachment of the desert, order and security were to be restored, labour to be set at work, and science and power to be devoted on a great scale to their only proper purpose, the increase of life. Here was an idea fit to inspire the most generous imagination. Here, for all the idealism of youth and the ambition of maturity, for diplomatists, engineers, administrators, agriculturists, educationists, an opportunity for the work of a lifetime, a task to appeal at once to the imagination, the intellect, and the organizing capacity of practical men, a scheme in which all nations might be proud to participate, and by which Europe might show to the backward populations that the power she had won over Nature was to be used for the benefit of man, and that the science and the arms of the West were destined to recreate the life of the East. What happened,