The Times' correspondent at Constantinople, who takes trouble to know
what passes in the Palace, recognising that the pivot of power in Turkey is there, has been alluding, for some weeks past, to a kind of plot which is believed there to have been concocted between the Sultan and the German Chancellor. Whenever war breaks out between Germany and France—and it is expected next spring—the Sultan is to invade Tunis and Algeria, and occupy a French corps d'armee, receiving in return the whole of North Africa. The Sultan is so delighted with this scheme, that he has sent a special mission to Berlin to arrange details, and the German influence is entirely in the ascendant in Constantinople. The story is so persistent, and explains so much in the Sultan's action, that there must be something in it, and we suppose the something to be this. Prince Bismarck likes to hamper France, and thinks that if the Sultan has hopes of a North-African empire, he will keep alive the Moorish insurrection, which is M. Gambetta's first embarrass- ment. He therefore excites those hopes, by the very safe promise that if during a Franco-German war the Sultan can conquer Tunis and Algeria, he may keep them. That Germany will on account of this dream do anything to prop the Sultan's throne, it is impossible to believe.
