was also involved in some diplomatic missions. For example, he worked with Bernhard von Bülow in a failed attempt to keep Italy from entering the war in 1915. He wrote letters to leading military authorities, later published, with extravagant plans for German annexations. Seen as an opportunist, he was said to have "no convictions, but only appetites". On 25, 27, and 28 November, Erzberger spoke on modernizing the administration. He won widespread socialist support for attempting through the Bundesrat to protect the civil rights of citizens. In December 1916 he successfully used the Budget Committee of the Reichstag to navigate the Auxiliary Services Act into law. It required all men not in the military or working in certain areas of the economy to be employed in a job vital to the war effort and, in return, recognized trade unions as equal negotiating partners with employers. Apart from Karl Liebknecht (a member of the Reichstag for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) until 1916), Erzberger was the only German politician who is known to have tried to stop the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Greeks, and the Aramean genocide in the Ottoman Empire. He traveled to Constantinople in February 1916 for negotiations with the Young Turks rulers allied with Germany, met Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha on 10 February 1916, and at their request prepared a memorandum on the measures to be taken in favor of Christians in Turkey. It explicitly referred only to Catholic Armenians and was never answered or considered by the Ottoman government. The general failure of his mission in Turkey filled Erzberger with indignation and disappointment. By 1917, with the armies stalemated on both fronts, Erzberger changed his political stance, becoming one of the leading opponents of unrestricted submarine warfare. In April 1917 he met a Russian envoy in Stockholm to discuss peace terms. He expounded his views on the war in a speech in the Reichstag on 6 July in which he called on the government to renounce territorial ambitions and conclude a negotiated end to the war. The speech was remarkable at the time in the way he carefully delineated the extent of German military weakness. That same day, leading deputies from the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), the Centre, and the liberal Progressive People's Party agreed to form an Inter-Factional Committee as a coordinating body, which was seen as the prelude to the parliamentarization of