- bly with a view to attracting Western intervention
at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.
Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes' appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the "spirit" of the 1907 Treaty.
When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he
