Modern German ascendancy in Turkey has constituted the gravest menace to the British project of uniting Egypt to India by a broad band of British territory. German diplomacy has exerted its best efforts during the past generation in the attempt to defeat this design. In overcrowded Germany the need of land for colonization is felt as keenly as the necessity of providing new markets for the country’s busy industries. Germany does not contain within its borders an agricultural area of sufficient extent for the requirements of its fast-growing populations. Against this it has been estimated that with adequate irrigation Asia Minor can turn out a million tons of wheat annually, as well as at least 200,000 tons of cotton. The basis of Teutonic southeasterly expansion lies in these facts. The immediate aim of German imperialism is to spread through Austria and the Balkan peninsula into Turkey down to the Gulf of Alexandretta and the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. But its realization implies the shattering of British projects. This rivalry in the west Asian field became inevitable from the moment that men of German speech became conscious of the power they had acquired in 1870 by banding together in a single state. The task of national consolidation once accomplished, the thought of German leaders naturally turned eastward in the direction in which land extended. Eight years later the prestige acquired by the newborn empire gave it a decisive voice in the treaty of Berlin. The first peg in the line of the Teutons’ southeasterly march was driven then by the revision of Bulgarian frontiers delimited by the treaty of San Stefano. The Slavic obstacle seemed removed from the Teutons’ path and its place filled by the more easily negotiable Turkish obstruction. From the date of that treaty to the events of these years of war Germany’s conduct in Turkey has been determined entirely by the call of the land. In 1882 a German military commission undertakes to reorganize the Turkish army. In 1889 the Deutsche Bank--whose directors are leaders of Germany’s oversea affairs--is granted a concession for a through line from Constantinople to Konia. This concession has since been modified so as to comprise the trans-Anatolian trunk railway which connects the capital with Bagdad. In 1898 the Kaiser visits Damascus in person, there solemnly to proclaim assurances of his unalterable good-will to the millions of Mohammedans scattered over the surface of the earth. In 1902 the Bagdad line is definitely awarded to a group of capitalists, among whom Germans represent the majority of investors. From that date on, railroad, mining and irrigation concessions in Turkey seemed to have been reserved exclusively for Germans. The transfer of Turkey’s unexploited riches to German ownership became almost an accomplished fact.