Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/123

 branch of manufacturing in Germany; it was represented on the directorates of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American steamship lines; it was the organizer of and chief stockholder in the German Petroleum Company. It was the owner of a number of overseas banking corporations stretching their activities from South America on the west to China on the east. The officers of the Deutsche Bank firmly believed that the export of capital and the export of commodities should go hand in hand. The other banks associated in the Bagdad Railway enterprise likewise were closely affiliated with important industrial enterprises. For example, the Dresdner Bank held the vice-chairmanship of Ludwig Loewe & Company, prominent manufacturers of munitions, and the chairmanship of the Orenstein Koppel Company, manufacturers of railway supplies. The Bank für Handel und Industrie possessed interests in the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, the German General Electric Company. A still further evidence of this close association of financial and industrial interests was furnished in January, 1905, when the chief German banks entered into a "community of interests" with August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes, the steel and coal barons of Germany.[21]

If German business men were likely to be interested in the economic development of Asia Minor, what was the nature of this interest?

Speaking to the Reichstag in March, 1908, Baron von Schoen, Foreign Secretary of the Empire, explained a few of the opportunities which the Bagdad Railway opened to German industry and commerce. "The advantages," he said, "which accrue to Germany from this great enterprise, conceived on a grand scale, are obvious. In the first place,