There has been no lack of cross currents _against_ the war policy of the Young Turkish Government. Ever since the entry of Turkey into the war, there has been a deeply rooted and unshakeable conviction among all kinds and conditions of men, even in the circles of the Pashas and the Court--the people of Turkey take too little interest in politics and are composed of far too heterogeneous elements for there to be anything in the nature of what we call "public opinion"--that Turkey's alliance with the Central Powers was a complete mistake and that it can lead to no good. It is of course known that since the outbreak of war Turkey has not only been under martial law and in a state of siege, but that under the régime of a brutal military dictatorship, with its system of espionage, personal liberty has been practically null and void. Any expressions of disapproval, therefore, or agitations against the "Committee" are naturally only possible in most intimate circles, and that with all secrecy. Little or nothing of the true opinions of this or that personage ever trickles through to publicity, and so it is utterly impossible, except from quite detached symptoms, to get any proper idea of what are the real thoughts and feelings of those cultured Turks who do not belong to the "Ittihad" and have no part in their system of pillage and aggrandisement. In spite of the limited information available it will be worth while, I think, to go into these counter-streams a little more fully. In pretty well every grade of society and among all nationalities in Turkey, there is the conviction that the old Sultan Abdul-Hamid would never have committed the fateful error of declaring war against the Entente and binding himself hand and foot to Germany. In the case of Turkey's remaining neutral, the Entente had formally promised her territorial integrity; Turkey refused. She felt herself driven to a war of prevention, principally through fear of the power of Russia. The statements made by those who agreed with Enver and Pasha and pushed for the war, that Turkey in the case of non-participation would be completely thrown on the mercy of a victorious Russia and that Russia's true aim in the war was the Dardanelles and Constantinople, have never been authenticated. There are still Turks, anti-Russian Turks, who even admitted this possibility, and yet believed the word of the Entente--at any rate of the Western Powers--and trusted to England's throwing her weight into the scale against Russia's plans of conquest, if Turkey remained neutral. They saw and still see no necessity for the Turkish Government to have entered on a war of prevention.