Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/214

 that these shipping interests objected to the construction of the Bagdad line! They warned the British public that the proposed railway would adversely affect the traffic passing through the Suez Canal; inasmuch as the United Kingdom was a stockholder in the Canal, this was the concern of every English citizen. They pointed out that the kilometric subsidy which had been guaranteed the Railway was to be paid from an increase in the customs duties; thus, it was charged, British commerce would be obliged to contribute indirectly to the dividends of the Deutsche Bank. The improvement of communications between Middle Europe and the Near East would be almost certain to disturb British trade with Turkey; the feared and hated "Made in Germany" trade-mark might exert its hypnotic influence in a region where British commerce heretofore had been preëminent. If, in addition, the German owners of the Bagdad Railway should choose to grant discriminatory rates to German goods, a severe body-blow would be dealt British economic interests in the Ottoman Empire. The completion of this Railway would bring with it all sorts of German interference in the Near East and undermine British commercial and maritime interests in the region.[16]

Many of the charges brought against the Bagdad Railway by the British shipping interests could not have been substantiated. As early as 1892, Lord Curzon stated emphatically that, for most commercial purposes, a trans-Mesopotamian railway would be next to valueless. "If I were a stockholder in the P. & O. [the Peninsular and Oriental, one of the Inchcape lines touching at Indian and Persian Gulf ports], I would not," he said, "except for the possible loss of the mails, be in the least alarmed at the competition of such a railway."[17] Informed Germans, likewise, did not consider the Bagdad Railway a serious competitor to the Suez Canal. One authority, for example,