TURKEY 



to negotiate a loan. But the Imperial Ottoman Bank group, that is to say, the heads 

 of the French money-market, imposed as their conditions that the Imperial Treasury 

 Department should be brought under the supervision of the Ottoman Bank, 

 njavid an d that the Bank should keep some sort of check on the expenditure to 



finance. see tnat ^ did not exceed the estimates, on the system followed before 

 the Revolution of 1908 in Macedonia. Such a scheme had been drawn up 

 by M. Ch. Laurent and even approved by Djavid Bey himself, but it had been thrown 

 out by the Finance Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, as a piece of that foreign 

 interference which Young Turkey professed to dread. Djavid Bey therefore declared 

 that it was quite hopeless to think of getting such conditions accepted by the Chamber, 

 and fell back on a less important group of French capitalists. But M. Laurent and the 

 heads of the money-market were already dissatisfied with Djavid Bey's independent 

 attitude of the year before, and, acting on their advice, M. Cochery said 

 that there were difficulties, it seemed to him, in the way of admitting the 

 Turkey" at l an on the recognised list (d la cote). It was an awkward business; all the 

 odds with more awkward because the grand vizier Hakki Pasha's action gave umbrage 

 France and a b ou t this time to the Triple Entente. Leaving Constantinople in August, 

 he had gone first to Bucharest and conferred with M. Djuvara, the Ruman- 

 ian minister for Foreign Affairs; and then to Marienbad, where he had long 

 and repeated interviews with M. d'Aehrenthal, the Austrian minister for Foreign 

 Affairs. There were rumours of a military agreement between Turkey and Rumania. 

 The Neue Freie Presse announced a rapprochement between Austria and Turkey, and 

 was not contradicted. And upon all this came the news that Turkey was buying two 

 ironclads of Germany. A strong current of hostility set in at Paris, and the press 

 strongly supported the Finance minister's demands. Djavid Bey went back to Con- 

 stantinople having accomplished nothing; Hakki Pasha who followed him to Paris did 

 no better. In October the loan negotiations were finally broken off; thereupon a violent 

 campaign began in the French press against what was called the uncompromising 

 arrogance of Young Turkey; while, in the Turkish press, a perfect outburst of fury 

 against France and England (where negotiations also had been fruitless) soon degenerat- 

 ed, in the Jeune-Turc newspaper, into an ardent Pan-Islamic and Germanophil campaign 

 against the Triple Entente. One highly characteristic result was a meeting held on 

 October 25th to protest against the action of England and Russia in Persia; the upshot 

 of which was that a Young Turk deputy, Ubeidullah Effendi, sent a telegram to the 

 Emperor of Germany, inviting him to intervene in the character of friend and protector 

 of 300,000,000 Moslems. Djavid Bey, seeing that all hope of a French or English loan 

 was now over, went to the German embassy and begged the good offices of Baron 

 Marschall von Bieberstein to help him to raise the money in Germany. 

 The drift Numerous German Banks formed a syndicate, and on November gth the 

 Germany. contract was signed with M. von Helferich of the Deutsche Bank, the most 

 important of those concerned. Hakki Pasha had carried out his plan; 

 Turkey was returning to the orbit of Germany. From that time Baron Marschall 

 again became as important a personage as he had been in the reign of Abdul-Hamid. 

 M. Laurent resigned his position in the Turkish service. 



Meanwhile, since the Albanians had been disarmed, the turn of the Macedonian 

 Bulgars and Greeks came next. And again the work too often was done by subalterns 

 with revolting brutality. Detachments told off to make the peasants give 

 U P their arms or point out where rifles were hidden, continually had re- 

 and Bulgaria, course to cruel beatings and ill usage, which sometimes ended in death. 

 The Yenidje-Varda affair in September 1910, when hundreds of Bulgarian 

 peasants were beaten and driven to starvation, and the Bulgarian priest was murdered 

 after a hideous beating, produced reverberations not only throughout the Bulgarian 

 press but all over western Europe. Another step taken in that same month by the 

 Hakki Pasha Cabinet drew down the deadly hate of the Greeks, who were already 

 exasperated by the Turkish boycott of their goods in retaliation for various incidents 



