I 9 I 3] Young Turkey's Choice of Germany 419 



centuries been replaced by those of religion, the largest section of the 

 population being Mohammedan. Religion was the only strong senti- 

 ment, at any rate, which could re-establish Turkey as a virile community 

 able to defend itself against its many enemies, and everything else was 

 secondary to that. It was the true reason why, when it came to a 

 choice between alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm and trust in English good- 

 will, Young Turkey necessarily chose the first. Grey, with Russia 

 prompting him, had nothing better to propose than disarmament and 

 economy in an emasculated State sterilized of all religious ardour. 

 This the Young Turks saw could only prove slow death to them, while 

 alliance with Germany, a military Power which offered to reconstruct 

 their army for them and restock their arsenals, gave them at least a 

 chance of new national life. All the patriotic Turks whom I came in 

 contact with gave me this account of it. The German Government, 

 they said, does not seek our dismemberment, it wishes us to be strong. 

 What it wants of us is not political but commercial advantage, whereas 

 Russia wants political possession of our provinces, while you at the 

 English Embassy, so far as you wish us good, wish it for the Christian 

 section of our people only. And this was true. Our Embassy at Con- 

 stantinople in Lowther's day had been, and still was in 1913, under the 

 influence of Fitzmaurice, the Embassy chief dragoman who saw things 

 through the spectacles of the Christian Missionary Societies, as did 

 such of our Radicals in Parliament as took an interest in Turkey. 

 Grey's Eastern policy, the Young Turks perfectly understood, was be- 

 fore all else an anti-Islamic policy, and this struck at their one surviving 

 element of strength. They preferred to trust Kaiser Wilhelm's pagan 

 attitude, and his promise of protecting Islam, made on his Syrian tour, 

 and more than once renewed. What was a special misfortune in 

 Shefket's death was that he, unlike Talaat Pasha, who succeeded him 

 as Vizier, was a sincere Moslem of the Liberal school which under- 

 stood the necessity of uniting all the Ottoman forces in a common pan- 

 Islamic patriotism. He was their most capable soldier, too, and his 

 loss universally ascribed to the Anglo-Russian party acting under 

 Kiamil, England's protege, though it did not result in Kiamil's recap- 

 ture of the Vizierate, placed sole power with those who by their racial 

 arrogance had driven Arabia into rebellion against the Sultan. I do 

 not, of course, suppose that our Embassy was cognizant of the design 

 to assassinate Shefket. Crimes of this sort are outside the range of 

 English diplomatic activities. But the plot to restore Kiamil was prob- 

 ably known, while a much larger responsibility may have lain with the 

 Russian Embassy. The curse of Grey's policy of Entente with the 

 Czai in Asiatic affairs is, that it involved us in practices of violence 

 foreign to our English traditions. 



Moreover Grey, as recorded in my Diary, was at that time becoming 



