Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/186

 *tant Prussia! The Germans, too, were prejudicing the Holy See against the Republic. A notoriously pro-German party at the Vatican, supported by their political allies, the Italians, were winning the sympathies of the Pope by insinuating references to "red France," "schismatic Russia," and "heretical England"! Thus was a dark plot being hatched against France and against the unity of Christendom![32]

This situation was not without its advantages to the French Clericals. Between the years 1899 and 1905, when the Bagdad Railway controversy was at its height, a serious domestic controversy was raging in France. In a bitter fight to extirpate Clericalism the Republican ministries of Waldeck-Rousseau and Émile Combes had put through law after law to curb the power of the Church and to break up the influence of the religious orders. The Clericals were waging a losing battle. But perhaps the last crushing blows might be warded off by resorting to a favorite maneuver of Louis Napoleon—the diversion of popular attention from domestic affairs to foreign policy. If Republicans and Monarchists, Socialists and bourgeois Liberals, Radicals and Conservatives, Free-Masons and Clericals, could be aroused against the German advance in Turkey, a common outburst of national pride might obscure, for a time at least, the domestic war on organized Catholicism. Therefore Clerical writers in France warned of the menace of the Bagdad Railway to the Russian Alliance, to the advance of French commerce, and to the ancient prerogatives in the East. "It is Germany, preëminent at Constantinople," said an anonymous writer in the Revue des deux mondes, "which blocks the future of Pan-Slavism in the East; it is Germany, installed in Kiao-chau, which can forestall Muscovite expansion toward the Pacific; it is Germany which, in the East and Far East, seeks to undermine our religious protectorate.