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 *pared in its high political significance with the late East India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta. Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed, was only a two days' march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a half-day's steaming from Cyprus, which the British had