and permitted us to see the claws of the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, but then he pulled the strings tight again, and only loud comfortable purrings could be heard, the Prussian musings over the ‘liberation’ of Turkey which she was helping to accomplish.  But nowadays, so it seems to me, the strings have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are clearly visible.  It is not so long since Dr. Schnee, Governor of German East Africa, sent a very illuminating document to Berlin from which I extract the following:—­

’Do you consider it possible to make a regulation prohibiting Islam altogether?  The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of Islam....’

That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in Alice in Wonderland:—­

’After such kindness that would be
  A dismal thing to do.’

But I am afraid that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear.  She has taken the Turkish oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes to sit down and eat them.  And did she not also interfere in the affair of Jewish massacres and declare that ’Pan-Turkish ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine’?  That must have been almost an unfriendly act from Turkey’s point of view, for it cannot be stated too clearly that part of the price which Germany paid for Turkey’s entry on her side into the war, was the liberty, as far as Germany was concerned, of managing her internal affairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the damnable doctrines of Ottomanisation.  The other Powers could not interfere, for they failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany promised not to.  That promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the Armenian massacres.  And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness.

Signs are not wanting that Turkey is beginning to realise the position in which she has placed herself, namely, that of a bankrupt dependant at the mercy of a nation to whom that quality is a mere derision.  Lately a quantity of small incidents have occurred, such as disputes over the ownership of properties financed by Germany and the really melodramatic depreciation in the German coinage, which unmistakably show the swift ebb of Turkey’s misplaced confidence.  More significant perhaps than any is a transaction that took place in May 1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha took the whole of their private fortunes out of the Deutsche Bank in Constantinople, and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely, the Banque Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Federale:  they drew