All these wonderful efforts at emancipation are perfectly justified from the patriotic point of view, and are so many blows dealt at Germany, who, quite apart from Rohrbach's _Welt_-_politik_, had at least hoped to find a lucrative field of privileged commercial activity in the country of her close and devoted allies the Turks. It is of supreme significance that while the war is still at its height, while the Empire of the Sultan is defending its very existence at the gates of the capital with German arms and German money, there is manifested with the most startling clearness the failure of German policy, the endangering of all these German "vital interests" in Turkey which according to Pan-German and Imperialistic views were one of the most important stakes to be won by wantonly letting loose this criminal war on Europe. No doubt many a German was only too well aware of the fact that in this Turkey suddenly roused by the war all the ground had been lost that he had built on with such profit before, and many an anxious face did one see in German circles in Constantinople. I need not tarry here over the drastic comments I heard from so many German merchants on this subject. They show a most curious state of mind on the part of those who had formerly, in their quest for gain and nothing but gain, profited in true parasitical fashion from the financial benefits of the Capitulations and had seen nothing but the money side of this arrangement which was, after all, entered into for other purposes. It was no rare thing and no paradox to find a German company director say, as I heard one say: "If things went against Turkey to-day, I would willingly shoulder my gun, old man as I am." No thinking man will expend too much grief over the ruthless abolition of the Capitulations, for they were unmoral and gave too much opportunity to parasites and rogues, while they were quite inadequate to protect the interests of civilisation. They may have sufficed in the time of Abdul-Hamid, who was easily frightened off and was always sensible and polite in his dealings with Europe. For the Turkey of Enver and Talaat quite other measures are needed. One must, according to one's political standpoint, either recognise and accept their nationalistic programme of emancipation or combat it forcibly by introducing full European control. And however willing one may be to let foreign nations develop in their own particular way and work out their own salvation, one's standpoint with regard to a State so behindhand, so fanatical, so misguided as Turkey can be but one: the introduction and continuation at all costs of whatever guarantees the best protection to European civilisation in this land of such importance culturally and historically.