Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/25

 modern transportation—was traversed by the Bagdad Railway. The locomotive provided a new short cut to the East.

That a commercial revolution of the nineteenth century should revive the old avenues of trade with the East was a matter of the utmost importance to all mankind. To the Western World the expansion of European commerce and the extension of Occidental civilization were incalculable, but certain, benefits. Statesmen and soldiers, merchants and missionaries alike might hail the new rail-*ways and steamship lines as entitled to a place among the foremost achievements of the age of steel and steam. To the East, also, closer contacts with the West held out high hopes for an economic and cultural renaissance of the former great civilizations of the Orient. Alas, however, the reopening of the medieval trade-routes served to create new arenas of imperial friction, to heighten existing international rivalries, and to widen the gulf of suspicion and hate already hindering cordial relationships between the peoples of Europe and the peoples of Asia. Economic rivalries, military alliances, national pride, strategic maneuvers, religious fanaticism, racial prejudices, secret diplomacy, predatory imperialism—these and other formidable obstacles blocked the road to peaceful progress and promoted wars and rumors of wars. The purchase of the Suez Canal by Disraeli was but the first step in the acquisition of Egypt, an imperial experiment which cost Great Britain thousands of lives, which more than once brought the empire to the verge of war with France, and which colored the whole character of British diplomacy in the Middle East for forty years. No sooner was the Trans-Siberian Railway completed than it involved Russia in a war with Japan. So it was destined to be with the Bagdad Railway. Itself a project of great promise for the economic and political regeneration of the Near East,