Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/159

 Great Plan was assiduously promoted by a patriotic and Pan-German press. It caught the interest of the ordinary workaday citizen, whose imagination was fired by the sweeping references to "our" trade, "our" investments, "our" religious interests in the Near East; the Bagdad Railway was the very heart of all these interests. Here was a railway which was to revive a medieval trade route to the East, which was to traverse the route of the Crusades. Here was a country which had been the much-sought-after empire of the great nations of antiquity, Assyria, Chaldea, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Here had risen and fallen the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon, and Hit. To these regions had turned the longing of the great conquerors, Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Saladin. With such materials some German Kipling might evolve phrases far more alluring than Fuzzy Wuzzy, and Tommy Atkins, and the White Man's Burden.[33]

Not all Germans were dazzled by the Oriental glamor of the Bagdad Railway plan. Herr Scheidemann, leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, time and time again sounded warnings against the complications almost certain to result from the construction of the railway. Speaking before the Reichstag in March, 1911, for example, he said: "We are the last to misjudge the great value of this road to civilization. We know its economic significance: we know that it traverses a region which in antiquity was a fabulously fertile country, and we welcome it as a great achievement if the Bagdad Railway opens up that territory. And if, by gigantic irrigation projects, the land can be made into a granary for Europe, as well as a land to which we could look for an abundant supply of raw materials, such as cotton, that would be