Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/145

 policy toward investments in backward countries may force the hand of an unwilling government. Whether this dissatisfaction be spontaneous or created by an interested press or both, it is certain to be powerful, for there are few governments which can resist for long the clamor for vigorous fostering of the nation's interests and rights abroad. And there was no lack of popular enthusiasm in Germany for the Bagdad Railway. The fact that French capital had been invested in the undertaking was usually forgotten. The grand design came to be referred to, affectionately, as unser Bagdad and, somewhat flamboyantly, as the "B. B. B." (Berlin-Byzantium-Bagdad). German publicists of imperial inclinations contemplated the Railway with reverent amazement, as though hypnotized. The project speedily became an integral part of the national Weltanschauung—a means of enabling Germans to compete for the rich commerce of the Orient, to appropriate some of its enormous wealth, to develop some of its apparently boundless possibilities. As a branch of Weltpolitik it held out alluring inducements for the exercise of political influence in the East—an influence which would serve at once to discomfit the Continental rivals of Germany and to promote the Drang nach Osten of her Habsburg ally.

The political aims of the German Empire in Turkey, however, were not concerned with colonization or conquest. It was not proposed, for example, to encourage German colonization of the regions traversed by the Bagdad Railway. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it is true, attempts had been made to stimulate German settlements in Syria and Mesopotamia. But later, when the problem of German oversea migration had become less acute, all proposals for German colonization in the Near East were abandoned.[8]

The difficulties in the way of European settlement of