Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/170

 Treasury would interfere with payment of the indemnity due on account of the War of 1877.[2]

Russian objections to the Bagdad Railway did not meet with a sympathetic reception in England. The Engineer, of August 11, 1899, in an editorial "Railways in Asia Minor," for example, expressed its firm opinion that many of the demands for the protection of Russian economic interests in Turkey were specious. "The world has yet to learn," ran the editorial, "that Russia allows commercial considerations to play any great part in her ideas of constructing railways; the Imperial authorities are influenced mainly by the policy of political expediency. The commercial competition thus foreseen by Russia is put forward merely as a stop-gap until Russia can get time and money to repeat in Asia Minor the methods of which she has made such success in Persia and the Far East." Other British opinion was of like character.

The Russian claim for exclusive control of railway construction in northern Anatolia met with equally bitter denunciation. The London Globe, of August 10, 1899, characterized as "impudence" the intention of the Russian Government "to regard Asiatic Turkey as a second Manchuria, on the pretence that the whole country has been mortgaged to Russia for payment of the Turkish war indemnity. If this preposterous claim were admitted, not only the development of Asia Minor but the opening of another short-cut to the East might be delayed until the end of the next century. Russia had so many ambitious and costly projects on hand at present that her nearly bankrupt treasury could not meet any fresh drain, and especially one of such magnitude as that in question. The policy of her Government, therefore, is to preserve Asia Minor as a tabula rasa on which the Russian pen can write as it pleases hereafter. It is a cool project, truly, but the success which has attended similar Russian en