[42] Stenographische Berichte, XII Legislaturperiode, 1 Session, Volume 231 (1908), pp. 4226 et seq.
[43] Quoted by the Annual Register, 1913, p. 326.
CHAPTER VIII
GREAT BRITAIN BLOCKS THE WAY
Early British Opinions Are Favorable
The idea of a trans-Mesopotamian railway was not new to informed Englishmen. As early as 1831 a young British army officer, Francis R. Chesney, who had seen service in the Near East, became impressed with the desirability of constructing a railway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. From 1835 to 1837—while Moltke was in Turkey studying military topography—Chesney was engaged in exploring the Euphrates Valley and upon his return to England brought glowing tales of the latent wealth of ancient Babylonia. It was not until twenty years later, however, that his plan for a Mesopotamian railway was taken up as a practical business proposition. In 1856 Sir William Andrew incorporated the Euphrates Valley Railway Company, appointed General Chesney as chief consulting engineer, and opened offices at Constantinople to carry on negotiations for a concession from the Imperial Ottoman Government. The plans of the Company were supported enthusiastically by Lord Palmerston, by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, British ambassador at Constantinople, and by the Turkish ambassador in London. The following year the Sultan granted the Euphrates Valley Company a concession for a railway from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the city of Basra, with the understanding that the Ottoman Treasury would guarantee a return of six per cent upon the capital invested in the enterprise. The promoters, however, experienced difficulty in raising funds for the construction of the line, and the project had to be abandoned.[1]
Lord Palmerston, in the meantime, was busily opposing the Suez Canal project. De Lesseps was handicapped by the obstructionist policies of British diplomacy as well as by the unwillingness of British financiers to invest in his enterprise. Palmerston frankly informed the great French engineer that in the opinion of the British Government the construction of the Canal was a physical impossibility; that if it were constructed it would injure British maritime supremacy; and that, after all, it was not so much a financial and commercial venture as a political conspiracy to provide the occasion for French interference in the East![2]
Nevertheless the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and immediately thereafter the question of a Mesopotamian railway was again brought to the fore in England. The advance of the Russians in the Near East and the control by the French of a short all-water route to the Indies gave rise to serious concern regarding the maintenance of communication with British India. In 1870 a British promoter proposed the construction of a railway from Alexandretta via Aleppo and Mosul to Bagdad and Basra. Such a railway, as Sir William Andrew had pointed out, would assure the undisturbed possession of India, for the “advancing standard of the barbarian Cossack would recoil before those emblems of power and progress, the electric wire and the steam engine, and his ominous tread would be restrained behind the icy barrier of the Caucasus.”[3] Also it would render Great Britain independent of the French-owned Suez Canal by providing an alternative route to the East, making possible more rapid transportation of passengers, mails, and troops to India. This plan seemed desirable of execution from so many points of view that a special committee of the House of Commons, presided over by Sir Stafford Northcote, was appointed “to examine and report upon the whole subject of railway communication between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf.” This committee reported that the construction of a trans-Mesopotamian railway was a matter of urgent imperial concern and recommended a plan which would have involved the investment of some £10,000,000. The necessity of providing an alternative route to India was obviated, however, by Disraeli’s purchase, in 1875, of a controlling interest in the Suez Canal at a cost of less than half that sum.[4]
For the forty years during which, at intervals, these projects were under discussion Germany was not even an interested spectator in Near Eastern affairs. Domestic problems of economic development and national unification were all-absorbing, and capitalistic imperialism was quite outside the scope of German policies. France and Russia, not Germany, were the disturbers of British tranquillity in the Orient.
When during the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a marked increase of German political and economic interests in the Ottoman Empire, there was little disposition in England to resent the German advance. As late as 1899, the year in which the preliminary Bagdad Railway concession was awarded to German financiers, British opinion, on the whole, was well disposed to Teutonic peaceful penetration in the Near East. The press was delighted at the prospect that the advent of the Germans in Turkey would block Russian expansion in the Middle East. Such eminent imperialists as Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes announced their willingness to conclude an entente with Germany in colonial affairs. The British Government was more suspicious of France than of Germany.[5]