Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/224

 the imperial communications were to be endangered, if undisputed control of the Persian Gulf was essential to the safety of the Empire, if the defence of India was to be jeopardized, if a German protectorate might be established in Asia Minor—if all these were possibilities, how could the Balfour Government afford to temporize with the German concessionaires, holding out the hope of British assistance? Were Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne less fearful for the welfare and safety of the Empire than were the newspaper editors? Rather, of course, were they convinced that the very best way of forestalling any of these developments was to permit and encourage British participation in the financing of the Bagdad Railway Company.[37] Only thus could British trade hope to share in the economic renaissance of the Ottoman Empire; only thus could there be British representatives on the Board of Directors to insist that the Deutsche Bank confine its efforts to the economic development of Turkey, excluding all political arrières pensées. And it would not have required an imperialist of the experience of Mr. Balfour to imagine that dual ownership of the Bagdad Railway might have the same ultimate outcome as the Dual Control in Egypt. But blind antagonism toward Germany prevented the average Englishman from seeing the obvious advantages of not abandoning the Bagdad Railway to the exclusive control of German and French capitalists.

One year after the failure of the Bagdad Railway negotiations of 1903, the age-old colonial rivalry of France and Great Britain was brought to a temporary close by the Entente Cordiale. It is not possible, with the information now at our disposal, to estimate with any degree