[406]Incidentally, the money wrested from the Egyptian fellah further fell, by way of Turkey, to European capital. The Turkish loans of 1854, 1855, 1871, 1877 and 1886 were based on the contributions from Egypt which were increased several times and paid direct into the Bank of England.
[407]‘It is stated by residents in the Delta’, reports The Times of March 31, 1879, ‘that the third quarter of the year’s taxation is now collected, and the old methods of collection applied. This sounds strangely by the side of the news that people are starving by the roadside, that great tracts of country are uncultivated, because of the physical burdens, and that the farmers have sold their cattle, the women their finery, and that the usurers are filling the mortgage offices with their bonds, and the courts with their suits of foreclosure’ (quoted by Th. Rothstein, Egypt’s Ruin, 1910, pp. 69-70).
[408]‘This produce’, wrote the correspondent of The Times from Alexandria, ‘consists wholly of taxes paid by the peasants in kind, and when one thinks of the poverty-stricken, overdriven, under-paid fellaheen in their miserable hovels, working late and early to fill the pockets of the creditors, the punctual payment of the coupon ceases to be wholly a subject of gratification’ (quoted by Rothstein, op. cit., p. 49).
[409]Eyth, an outstanding exponent of capitalist civilisation in the primitive countries, characteristically concludes his masterly sketch on Egypt, from which we have taken the main data, with the following imperialist articles of faith: ‘What we have learnt from the past also holds true for the future. Europe must and will lay firm hands upon those countries which can no longer keep up with modern conditions on their own, though this will not be possible without all kinds of struggle, when the difference between right and wrong will become blurred, when political and historical justice will often enough mean disaster for millions and their salvation depend upon what is politically wrong. All the world over, the strongest hand will make an end to confusion, and so it will even on the banks of the Nile’ (op. cit., p. 247). Rothstein has made it clear enough what kind of ‘order’ the British created ‘on the banks of the Nile’.
[410]Already in the early twenties of the last century, the Anglo-Indian government commissioned Colonel Chesney to investigate the navigability of the River Euphrates in order to establish the shortest possible connection between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, resp. India. After detailed preparations and a preliminary reconnaissance in winter 1831, the expedition proper set out in 1835/7. In due course, British staff and officials investigated and surveyed a wider area in Eastern Mesopotamia. These efforts dragged on until 1866 without any useful results for the British government. But at a later date Great Britain returned to the plan of connecting the Mediterranean with India by way of the Gulf of Persia, though in a different form, i.e. the Tigris railway project. In 1879, Cameron travelled through Mesopotamia for the British government to study the lie of the land for the projected railway (Max Freiherr v. Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Hauran, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien, vol. ii, pp. 5 and 36).
[411]S. Schneider, Die Deutsche Bagdadbahn (1900), p. 3.
[412]Saling, Börsenjahrbuch 1911/12, p. 2211.
[413]Saling, op. cit., pp. 360-1. Engineer Pressel of Wuerttemberg, who as assistant to Baron v. Hirsch was actively engaged in these transactions in European Turkey, neatly accounts for the total grants towards railway-building in Turkey which European capital wrested from the Turkish government:
| Length in km. | Paid guarantee in francs | |
| 3 lines in European Turkey | 1888·8 | 33,099,352 |
| Turkish permanent way in Asia completed before 1900 | 2313·2 | 53,811,538 |
| Commissions and other costs connected with the guaranteed railway grants paid to the A.D.P.O. | 9,351,209 | |
| Total | 96,262,099 |
All this refers only to the period before 1899; not until that date were the revenue grants paid in part. The tithes of no less than 28 out of the 74 sandshaks in Asiatic Turkey had been pledged for the revenue grants, and with these grants, between 1856 and 1900, a grand total of 1,576 miles of rails had been laid down in Asiatic Turkey. Pressel, the expert, by the way gives an instance of the underhand methods employed by the railway company at Turkish expense; he states that under the 1893 agreement the Anatolian company promised to run the railway to Baghdad via Angora, but later decided that this plan of theirs would not work and, having qualified for the guarantee, left the line to its fate and got busy with another route via Konya. ‘No sooner have the companies succeeded in acquiring the Smyrna-Aydin-Diner line, than they will demand the extension of this line to Konya, and the moment these branch lines are completed, the companies will move heaven and earth to force the goods traffic to use these new routes for which there are no guarantees, and which, more important still, need never share their takings, whereas the other lines must pay part of their surplus to the government, once their gross revenue exceeds a certain amount. In consequence, the government will gain nothing by the Aydin line, and the companies will make millions. The government will foot the bill for practically the entire revenue guarantee for the Kassaba-Angora line, and can never hope to profit by its contracted 25 per cent share in the surplus above £600 gross takings’ (W. V. Pressel, Les Chemins de Fer en Turquie d’Asie (Zurich, 1900), p. 7).