Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/119

 *pedient to the Bagdad Railway Company to push construction of its line until such time as a reasonable degree of security should be restored. It was not until December, 1909, therefore, after the deposition of Abdul Hamid, that good friend of German enterprise in Turkey, that a construction company was formed to build the railway across the Taurus and Amanus mountains. During the autumn of the same year a Franco-German syndicate underwrote the second and third series of Bagdad Railway loans, thereby providing the necessary funds for the work.[18]

The years 1904 to 1909 were lean years, judged by actual progress in the laying of rails from Bulgurlu to Bagdad and Basra. Nevertheless, they were years characterized, on the part of the investors interested in the consummation of the great enterprise, by every possible activity to prepare the way for eventual success on a grand scale. In the spring of 1906, for example, Dr. Karl Helfferich was appointed assistant general manager of the Anatolian Railways, and one year later was elected a managing director of the Deutsche Bank with general supervision over all of the Bank's railway enterprises in the Near East. The appointment of Dr. Helfferich—who, although he was only thirty-four years of age, had achieved an international reputation—aroused widespread comment and turned out to be an event of first-rate importance in the history of the Bagdad Railway. As a young professor of political science in the University of Berlin, Dr. Helfferich won general recognition as an unusually able economist. He was persuaded to enter the Government service in 1901 and became assistant secretary in the Colonial Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was