Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/239

 CHAPTER IX

THE YOUNG TURKS ARE WON OVER

The Young Turk revolutions of 1908 and 1909, which ended the reign of Abdul Hamid in the Ottoman Empire, offered France and Great Britain an unprecedented opportunity to assume moral and political leadership in the Near East. Many members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the revolutionary party, had been educated in western European universities—chiefly in Paris—and had come to be staunch admirers of French and English institutions. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," the slogan of Republican France, became the watch-cry of the new era in Turkey. Parliamentary government and ministerial responsibility under a constitutional monarch, the political contribution of Britain to Western civilization, became the aim of the reformers at Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire was to be modernized politically, industrially, and socially according to the best of western European traditions.[1]

Into this scheme of things German influence fitted not at all. From the Young Turk point of view the Kaiser was an autocrat who not only had blocked democratic reform in Germany, but also had propped up the tottering regime of Abdul Hamid and thus had aided suppression of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire. As for Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, he had hobnobbed with the ex-Sultan and was considered as much a representative of