[44] H. H. Johnston, Common Sense in Foreign Policy (London, 1913), pp. v-vii. A similar opinion was expressed by Colonel A. C. Yate, at a meeting of the Central Asian Society, May 22, 1911. In answer to an alarmist paper on the Bagdad Railway which had been read to the society by André Chéradame, Colonel Yate made a spirited speech in which he warned his countrymen that M. Chéradame proposed that they should follow the same mistaken policy which had guided Lord Palmerston in resistance to the construction of the Suez Canal. “We cannot pick up every day,” he said, “a Lord Beaconsfield, who will repair the errors of his blundering predecessors.... Because the German Emperor and his instruments have adopted and put into practice the plans which Great Britain rejected [for a trans-Mesopotamian railway], we are now, forsooth, to pursue a policy which savours partly of ‘sour grapes’ and partly of ‘dog-in-the-manger,’ and which in either aspect will do nothing to strengthen British hands and promote British interests.” Proceedings of the Central Asian Society (London), May 22, 1911, p. 19.
[45] Johnston, op. cit., pp. 50–51, 61. Sir Harry Johnston made an extended lecture tour through Germany during 1912 for the purpose of promoting Anglo-German friendship. For details of this trip see Schmitt, op. cit., pp. 355–356. It is interesting to note how nearly Sir Harry’s proposals corresponded with the terms of the treaties of 1913–1914. Infra, Chapter X. For a similar point of view, cf. Angus Hamilton, Problems of the Middle East (London, 1909), pp. 178–180.
[46] Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, fifth series, Volume 7 (1911), pp. 601–602. The italics are mine.
CHAPTER IX
THE YOUNG TURKS ARE WON OVER
A Golden Opportunity Presents Itself to the Entente Powers
The Young Turk revolutions of 1908 and 1909, which ended the reign of Abdul Hamid in the Ottoman Empire, offered France and Great Britain an unprecedented opportunity to assume moral and political leadership in the Near East. Many members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the revolutionary party, had been educated in western European universities—chiefly in Paris—and had come to be staunch admirers of French and English institutions. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the slogan of Republican France, became the watch-cry of the new era in Turkey. Parliamentary government and ministerial responsibility under a constitutional monarch, the political contribution of Britain to Western civilization, became the aim of the reformers at Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire was to be modernized politically, industrially, and socially according to the best of western European traditions.[1]
Into this scheme of things German influence fitted not at all. From the Young Turk point of view the Kaiser was an autocrat who not only had blocked democratic reform in Germany, but also had propped up the tottering regime of Abdul Hamid and thus had aided suppression of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire. As for Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, he had hobnobbed with the ex-Sultan and was considered as much a representative of the old order of things as Abdul Hamid himself. As Dr. Rohrbach described the situation, “the Young Turks, liberals of every shade, believed that Germany had been a staunch supporter of Abdul Hamid’s tyrannical government and that the German influence constituted a decided danger for the era of liberalism. That thought was zealously supported by the English and French press in Constantinople. The Young Turkish liberalism showed in the beginning a decided leaning toward a certain form of Anglomania. England, the home of liberty, of parliaments, of popular government—such were the catch phrases promulgated in the daily papers.”[2]
German prestige suffered still further because of the unseemly conduct of Germany’s allies toward the Young Turk Government. The revolution of 1908 was less than three months old when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Almost simultaneously, Ferdinand of Bulgaria—presumably at the instigation and with the connivance of Austria—declared the independence of Bulgaria from the Sultan and assumed for himself the title of tsar. To cap the climax, Italy was intriguing in Tripoli and Cyrenaica with a view to the eventual seizure of those provinces. Baron Marschall found it impossible to explain away these hostile moves of the allies of Germany, and he protested vehemently against the failure of the Foreign Office at Berlin to restrain Austria-Hungary and Italy. He warned Prince von Bülow that vigorous action must be taken if Germany’s influence in the Near East were not to be totally destroyed.[3]