Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/199

 *perienced difficulty in raising funds for the construction of the line, and the project had to be abandoned.[1]

Lord Palmerston, in the meantime, was busily opposing the Suez Canal project. De Lesseps was handicapped by the obstructionist policies of British diplomacy as well as by the unwillingness of British financiers to invest in his enterprise. Palmerston frankly informed the great French engineer that in the opinion of the British Government the construction of the Canal was a physical impossibility; that if it were constructed it would injure British maritime supremacy; and that, after all, it was not so much a financial and commercial venture as a political conspiracy to provide the occasion for French interference in the East![2]

Nevertheless the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and immediately thereafter the question of a Mesopotamian railway was again brought to the fore in England. The advance of the Russians in the Near East and the control by the French of a short all-water route to the Indies gave rise to serious concern regarding the maintenance of communication with British India. In 1870 a British promoter proposed the construction of a railway from Alexandretta via Aleppo and Mosul to Bagdad and Basra. Such a railway, as Sir William Andrew had pointed out, would assure the undisturbed possession of India, for the "advancing standard of the barbarian Cossack would recoil before those emblems of power and progress, the electric wire and the steam engine, and his ominous tread would be restrained behind the icy barrier of the Caucasus."[3] Also it would render Great Britain independent of the French-owned Suez Canal by providing an alternative route to the East, making possible more rapid transportation of passengers, mails, and troops to India. This plan seemed desirable of execution from so many points of view that a special committee of the