Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/223

 *way, and other German enterprises in Turkey, were business propositions only. They knew that promises to respect the sovereignty of the Sultan were courteous formalities of European diplomatists to cloak scandalous irregularities—it was in full recognition of the sacred and inviolable integrity of Turkey that Disraeli had taken possession and assumed the "defence" of Cyprus in 1878! Furthermore, experienced imperialists knew full well that economic penetration was the foundation of political control. As Mr. Lloyd George informed the House of Commons in 1911, the kilometric guarantee of the Bagdad Railway gave German bankers a firm grip on the public treasury in Turkey, and such a hold on the imperial Ottoman purse-strings might lead no one could prophesy where.[35]

British experience in Egypt, however, indicated one direction in which it might possibly lead. English control in Egypt had been acquired by the most modern and approved imperial methods. It was no old-fashioned conquest; the procedure was much more subtle than that. First, Egypt was weighted down by a great burden of debt to British capitalists; then British business men and investors acquired numerous privileges and intrenched themselves in their special position by virtue of the Anglo-French control of Egyptian finance; the "advice" of British diplomatists came to possess greater force of law than the edicts of the Khedive; "disorders" always could be counted upon to furnish an excuse for military conquest and annexation, should that crude procedure eventually become necessary.[36] Might not Wilhelmstrasse tear a leaf out of Downing Street's book of imperial experience?

There is a seeming inconsistency in this description of the British interests involved in the Bagdad Railway question. If British shipping might be seriously injured, if