A strong Russia, then, was the last thing that Germany desired, for she could not possibly hope to use the strength and stability of Russia for her own ends, and therefore Russia’s strength was a barrier to her advance. But (still tracing the policy of the Mittel-Europa party) her method with regard to Turkey was precisely the opposite to her Russian programme. The sick man (to adopt Lord Aberdeen’s obsolete and misleading phrase) could never seriously threaten the advance of her plans, and while the rest of the European powers were propping up the throne of Abdul-Hamid and, subsequently, the Camorra of the Young Turks, for fear of the confusion and quarrelling that would follow on the disintegration of the Turkish Empire, Germany, with a livelier foresight and an experter medical skill, was, as it were, transfusing her own blood into the veins of the patient. What she wanted was not a weak Turkey, but a strong Turkey who should be hers, and from the earliest days of the reign of the present Emperor, Wilhelm II, until to-day, she has been strengthening the hands of the Turk, knowing that the strength with which she supplied him was being converted back into her own. Like, it is true, seeks like, and the psychical affinity of Turk and German was very clearly shewn in their respective treatments of Armenians and Belgians, but there was more than brotherly sympathy in the hand-clasp of Berlin and Constantinople. To-day the Sultan writhes in the famous iron grip of the hand that sought his so cordially. It is worth while, with the object of understanding the policy of Mittel-Europa, to survey quite briefly its dealings with Turkey, dictated with the view of turning Turkey, as Germany has now completely done, into a German province, not less dependent on her and her armies than is the kingdom of Hanover or Bavaria. The merchant of Bremen knows very well that his prosperity is bound up with the military efficiency of the Fatherland, and in exactly the same way Talaat and Enver and the Sultan (who once was the shadow of God, and is now the shadow of Wilhelm II) know that unless the victory in the present war rests with the German arms, the ill-knit Ottoman Empire, in which the majority of the populations consists not of Turks but of alien races, will be in large measure taken from them by the dispositions of the Allies, who have pledged themselves to free those peoples from the unspeakable tyranny of the Turk. The Sultan by now understands, too, that his empire has already become a vassal state of Germany, who permits him to manage its internal affairs only in so far as they concern massacres and reforms of that description. In other respects, all Turkish matters, military, naval, economical, educational and financial, are in German hands. And this result is the work of the Mittel-Europa policy, part of the projected scheme.