It should have been to the interest of France and, of Russia, and a policy of skilful strategy, to oppose Turkey when supported by the Triple Alliance, and to create around and about her, in Greece as in the Balkans, such a force of resistance as would have put a stop to her schemes of expansion, resulting from those of the Powers of the Triple Alliance.  By so doing, France and Russia might have taken them in the rear and upset their plans.  We were already in a position of considerable advantage, in that we could leave to the King of Prussia, the German Emperor, all the responsibility for the crimes of the Sultan, observing at the same time all those principles which would have maintained, in their integrity, the moral and Christian traditions of France and Russia.  But our policy has been that of children building castles in the sand.  Confronted by a triumphant Turkey, leaning on the Triple Alliance, and by a Sultan suffering from the dementia of blood-lust, certain of the faithful friendship of William II, and confident in his victorious army (already 720,000 strong, and commanded by a German General Staff); confronted by such fears and threats, we have chosen to place all our hopes upon the balanced mind of William II, the generosity of the Sultan, and the loyalty of oriental statecraft!  I have said it so repeatedly that I may have wearied my readers, but I say it again; “To their undoing, France and Russia have sacrificed their policy to Turkey, protected by Germany.”  They are now confronted by German policy, evasive and at the same time triumphant, that is to say, in full command of the situation which it has brought about.  William II is at last revealed, even to the blindest eyes, as the instigator and sole director of everything that has taken place in the East since his visit to Constantinople.  He takes pleasure in advising the Sultan day by day, for he makes him do everything that he himself is prevented from doing, and he enjoys the satisfaction of being a tyrant in imagination when he cannot be one actually.

June 25, 1897. [12]

The Sultan’s million of armed men, organised under a German General Staff, in a country where Germany is making every effort to possess herself of every kind of influence and every source of wealth, is not this the chief danger which Russia has to fear, and whose imminence she should clearly foresee, in dealing with a Sultan like Abdul Hamid, a man of nervous fears and bloodthirsty instincts, bound to furtherance of the sudden or premeditated schemes of William II?

July 27, 1897. [13]