A more immediately practicable field of operations was to be found in the Turkish Empire.  It was here that the most systematic endeavours were made during this period:  the Berlin-Bagdad scheme, which was to be the keystone of the arch of German world-power, had already taken shape before our period closed, though the rest of the world was strangely blind to its significance.  Abstractly regarded, a German dominion over the wasted and misgoverned lands of the Turkish Empire would have meant a real advance of civilisation, and would have been no more unjustifiable than the British control of Egypt or India.  This feeling perhaps explained the acquiescence with which the establishment of German influence in Turkey was accepted by most of the powers.  They had yet to realise that it was not pursued as an end in itself, but as a means to further domination.

But neither the great Berlin-Bagdad project, nor any of the other dreams and visions, had been definitely put into operation during the decade 1890-1900.  Germany was as yet feeling the way, preparing the ground, and building up her resources both military and industrial.  Perhaps the main result which emerged from the tentative experiments of these years was that at every point the obstacle was the sprawling British Empire, and the too-powerful British fleet.  The conviction grew that the overthrow of this fat and top-heavy colossus was the necessary preliminary to the creation of the German world-state.

This was a doctrine which had long been preached by the chief political mentor of modern Germany, Treitschke, who died in 1896.  He was never tired of declaring that Britain was a decadent and degenerate state, that her empire was an unreal empire, and that it would collapse before the first serious attack.  It would break up because it was not based upon force, because it lacked organisation, because it was a medley of disconnected and discordant fragments, worshipping an undisciplined freedom.  That it should ever have come into being was one of the paradoxes of history; for it was manifestly not due to straightforward brute force, like the German Empire; and the modern German mind could not understand a state which did not rest upon power, but upon consent, which had not been built up, like Prussia, by the deliberate action of government, but which had grown almost at haphazard, through the spontaneous activity of free and self-governing citizens.  Treitschke and his disciples could only explain the paradox by assuming that since it had not been created by force, it must have been created by low cunning; and they invented the theory that British statesmen had for centuries pursued an undeviating and Machiavellian policy of keeping the more virile states of Europe at cross-purposes with one another by means of the cunning device called the Balance of Power, while behind the backs of these tricked and childlike nations Britain was meanly snapping up all the most desirable