Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/220

 of India, became alarmed at the construction of a railway which would link the head of the Persian Gulf with the railways of Central Europe. Lord Curzon was a trained imperialist. It was his custom to utter few words; to make no proclamations from the housetops; to act promptly—and in secret. It was at the instigation of the Indian Government that Colonel Meade, British resident in the Persian Gulf region, proceeded to Koweit and negotiated with the Sheik a clandestine agreement by which the latter accepted the "protection" of the British Government and agreed to enter into no international agreements without the consent of a British resident adviser.[26] When a German technical commission visited Koweit in 1900 to negotiate for terminal and port facilities, they found the Sheik suspiciously intractable to their wishes. Thereupon Abdul Hamid despatched an expedition to Koweit to assert his sovereignty over the Sheik's territory, but the presence of a British gunboat rendered both reason and force of no avail.[27]

"Protection" of Koweit by Great Britain served notice on both Turkey and Germany that the construction of a railway, owned and controlled by Germans, to a deep-*water port on the Persian Gulf was deemed contrary to the interests of the British Empire. From first to last British officials persistently refused to accede to any arrangement which would thus jeopardize imperial communications. Control of the Persian Gulf, an outpost of Indian defence, became the keynote of British resistance to the Bagdad Railway.

During the visit of William II to England in 1907, he was informed by Lord Haldane, Sir Edward Grey, and other responsible British statesmen, that their objections to the Bagdad enterprise would be removed if the sections of the Railway from Bagdad to Basra and the Persian Gulf were under the administration of British capitalists.[28]