strength to British diplomacy and a source of enormous danger to world peace.
It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey's Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the 1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office's actual war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events played straight into the Foreign Office's hand. The brigade off Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to
