Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/171

 *deavors in the Far East will not, we undertake to predict, meet with repetition."

The Russian Government, meanwhile, was interposing serious objections to the Bagdad Railway. M. Zinoviev, the Tsar's minister at Constantinople, informed the Sublime Porte that the proposed extension of the Anatolian Railways from Angora across Armenia to Mosul and Bagdad would be a strategic menace to the Caucasus frontier and, as such, could not be tolerated. If Russian wishes in the matter were not respected, immediate measures would be taken to collect all arrears—amounting to over 57,000,000 francs—of the indemnity due the Tsar under the Treaty of Berlin (1878). The outcome of these demands was submission by the Sultan's Government. The proposed Angora-Kaisarieh-Diarbekr route was abandoned in favor of one extending from Konia, through the Cilician Gates of the Taurus Mountains, to Adana, Aleppo, and Mosul—the latter being the route over which the Bagdad Railway actually was constructed. The discussions between the Russian and Ottoman Governments subsequently were crystallized and confirmed by the so-called Black Sea Agreement of 1900, which pledged the Sultan to award no further concessions for railways in northern Anatolia or Armenia except to Russian nationals or to syndicates approved by the Tsar, and, furthermore, to award such Russian concessionaires terms at least as favorable as those to be granted the Bagdad Railway Company.[3]

The agreement thus reached, however, satisfied Russia only temporarily. In December, 1901, M. Witte, Imperial Minister of Finance at Petrograd, stated categorically that he considered the construction of the Bagdad Railway by any Power other than Russia a menace to the imperial interests of the Tsar. Proposals for the internationalization of the line he asserted to be chimerical; in his opinion