Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/222

 perhaps, lead to the introduction into the Persian imbroglio of the influence of another Great Power. Persia lay astride one of the natural routes of communication to India. The uncertainty of the situation in Persia already was such as to cause grave concern in Great Britain, and there were few British statesmen who would have welcomed German interference in addition to Russian intrigue.[32]

British imperialists, too, had excellent reason to fear that any increase in the power of the Sultan, such as would be certain to follow the construction of adequate rail communications in the Ottoman Empire, might be but the first step in a renaissance of Mohammedan political ambitions, and, perhaps, a Moslem uprising everywhere against Christian overlords. Such a situation—had it been sufficiently matured before the outbreak of the War of 1914—might have been disastrous to the British position in the East: a rejuvenated Turkey, supported by a powerful Germany, might have been in a position to menace the Suez Canal, "the spinal cord of the Empire," and to lend assistance to seditious uprisings in Egypt, India, and the Middle East. Why should Britain not have been disturbed at such a prospect, when prominent German publicists were boastfully announcing that this was one of the principal reasons for official espousal of the Bagdadbahn?[33] Why should British statesmen have closed their eyes to such a possibility, when the recognized parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany warned the members of the Reichstag that limits must be placed upon the political ramifications of the Bagdad enterprise, lest it lead to a disastrous war with Great Britain?[34]

Furthermore, British statesmen were too intimately acquainted with the dynamics of capitalistic imperialism to accept the assurances of Germans that the Bagdad Rail