Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/176

 *cis I and renewed and extended by his successors from Henry IV to Louis XV. They knew that the French language was the language not only of the educated classes in Turkey, but, also, in Syria, of the traders, so that it could be said that a traveler in Syria might almost consider himself in a French dependency. They were proud of the fact that the term "Frank" was the symbol of Western civilization in the Near East. They were aware of the far-reaching educational work of French missionaries. France, to their mind, had done a great work of Christian enlightenment in the Moslem stronghold, Turkey. Was the Government of the Republic to be backward in asserting the interests of France, when Bourbons and Bonapartes had so ably paved the way for the extension of French civilization in the Holy Land? Reasoning of this kind was popular in France during 1898 and 1899, when the Kaiser's visit to Abdul Hamid was still under discussion and when the first indications were given that a German company was to be awarded a concession for the construction of a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf.

On the other hand, however, there was a considerable and a powerful group in France which urged the French Government, if not to support the project of the Bagdad Railway, at least to put no obstacles in its way. The members of this group were French financiers with investments in Turkey. They believed that the construction of the Railway would usher in a new era of prosperity in the Ottoman Empire which would materially increase the value of the Turkish securities which they owned. If the interests of these financiers were not supported by historical traditions and nationalist sentiment, they were tangible and supported by imposing facts. It was estimated, in 1903, that French investors controlled three-fifths, amounting to a billion and a half of francs, of the