the old order of things as Abdul Hamid himself. As Dr. Rohrbach described the situation, "the Young Turks, liberals of every shade, believed that Germany had been a staunch supporter of Abdul Hamid's tyrannical government and that the German influence constituted a decided danger for the era of liberalism. That thought was zealously supported by the English and French press in Constantinople. The Young Turkish liberalism showed in the beginning a decided leaning toward a certain form of Anglomania. England, the home of liberty, of parliaments, of popular government—such were the catch phrases promulgated in the daily papers."[2]
German prestige suffered still further because of the unseemly conduct of Germany's allies toward the Young Turk Government. The revolution of 1908 was less than three months old when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Almost simultaneously, Ferdinand of Bulgaria—presumably at the instigation and with the connivance of Austria—declared the independence of Bulgaria from the Sultan and assumed for himself the title of tsar. To cap the climax, Italy was intriguing in Tripoli and Cyrenaica with a view to the eventual seizure of those provinces. Baron Marschall found it impossible to explain away these hostile moves of the allies of Germany, and he protested vehemently against the failure of the Foreign Office at Berlin to restrain Austria-Hungary and Italy. He warned Prince von Bülow that vigorous action must be taken if Germany's influence in the Near East were not to be totally destroyed.[3]
The decline of German prestige at Constantinople could not have been without effect upon the Bagdad Railway and the other activities of the Deutsche Bank. The Bagdad enterprise, in fact, was looked upon as a concrete manifestation of German hegemony at the Sublime Porte and as the crowning achievement of the friendship of those two
