Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/121

 of the Deutsche Palästina Bank[17] encouraged the formation of other similar institutions. The ''Nationalbank für Deutschland, in 1904, founded the Banque d'Orient'', with offices in Hamburg, Athens, Constantinople, Salonica, and Smyrna. The following year the Dresdner Bank, in coöperation with other large Austro-German financial institutions, inaugurated the important Deutsche Orientbank, with a capital stock of sixteen million marks. This latter bank took over the Hamburg and Constantinople offices of the Banque d'Orient and established a large number of branches of its own, including those at Alexandria, Cairo, and Smyrna. The Deutsche Orientbank became an active promoter of industrial enterprises in Asiatic Turkey; for example, in 1908 it organized ''La Société pour Enterprises Electriques en Orient'', a company which proceeded to take over the surface railways as well as the electric light and power concession of Constantinople. In 1908 the ''Deutsche Bank'' itself formally opened an office in Constantinople for the transaction of a general banking business.[18]

The entry of these German banks into the Near Eastern field was of no small importance to the British and French financial institutions already there. The German bankers allowed liberal rates of interest on time and check deposits and permitted reasonable overdrafts at low rates. These practices were in sharp contrast with the rigid regulations of the older-established banks. The Deutsche Bank undertook to collect claims of local merchants against the Turkish Government; through its influence in the Government departments it cut red tape and secured payments which otherwise might have been delayed for years. Constantinople business men welcomed their emancipation from the ultra-conservative methods of the older institutions, and it was not long before a very thriving business was being transacted by the German banks and their agencies in the Near East.[19] Here was a high-powered bomb to