minority in power--too weak and corrupt to remain in it without
Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it
at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home in return for servitude in
diplomacy and war--the deal is called "Hegemony," and is as old as
Ancient Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Government Germany
threatens the British and Russian Empires from all the Ottoman
frontiers; and with the free hand that is their price the Young Turks
inflict on all lands and peoples within those frontiers whatever evils
conduce to the maintenance of their pretensions.

As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding
underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see
how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad
Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of
the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself
admits that

"The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway cannot be described as
properly paying its way. It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from
Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Anatolian Railway with the
older railway system in the West.... The parts of Asia Minor which were
thickly populated and prosperous in antiquity lie mostly westward of
this first section of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys and"
(French and English) "railways leading down to the Aegean."

"There are other once-flourishing parts of the peninsula," he continues,
"which the Bagdad Railway does not touch at all"--the Vilayet of Sivas
and the other Armenian provinces. The original German plan was to carry
the Railway through Armenia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not
unnaturally vetoed the construction, so near her Caucasian frontiers, of