Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/209

 by their criticisms of the British Foreign Office on the Venezuela affair. Who instigated these papers, from whence they derived their information, is a matter upon which I cannot speak with certainty. My own impression is that the instigation proceeded from Russian sources. The clamour raised by these two organs was immediately taken up by practically the whole of the English press, London having really gone into a frenzy on the matter owing to the newspaper campaign, which it would have been quite impossible to counteract or influence. It is, I think, due to you that you should know the histoire intime of what has passed."[12]

There was only one London newspaper, the St. James's Gazette, which came out frankly in favor of British participation in the Bagdad Railway. In the issue of April 14, 1903, the editor ridiculed the suggestion of the Spectator that the Foreign Office was obliged to warn bankers of the financial risks involved in the enterprise. "Why our contemporary should be so anxious to save financiers, British or foreign, from making a bad investment of their money, we cannot imagine. Financiers are generally pretty wide-awake, and the City as a rule requires no advice from Fleet Street, the Strand, or Whitehall in transacting its business." In an editorial entitled "Bagdad and Bag Everything," April 22, 1903, the Gazette condemned The Times for the "curious and alarmist deductions" which that journal drew from the terms of the Bagdad Railway convention. The suggestion that this was a deliberate attempt on the part of Germany to ruin British trade was characterized "as much a figment of a fevered imagination as the mind-picture of Turkey using 'this enormous line to pour down troops to reduce the shores of the Persian Gulf to the same happy condition as Armenia and Macedonia,' about which The Times is so suddenly and unaccountably concerned. The concession