Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/251

 any non-Ottoman group of financiers. The German proposals were accepted and incorporated in a formal convention of March 21, 1911, by which the Bagdad Railway Company abandoned its claims to further commitments from the Ottoman Treasury and agreed, at the pleasure of the Turkish Government, to surrender its concession for the Bagdad-Basra-Persian Gulf sections to an Ottoman company internationally owned and controlled.[13]

The outcome of the negotiations for an increase in the customs duties was a keen disappointment to the Young Turks. Desirous as they were of carrying the Bagdad enterprise to a successful conclusion, they could not help resenting its political implications. "We tried," writes Djavid Bey, "to better our relations with the English; they talked to us of the Bagdad Railway! We tried to introduce financial and economic reforms in Turkey; we found before us the Bagdad Railway! Every time an occasion arose, the French stirred up the Bagdad Railway question. Even the Russians, notwithstanding the Potsdam Agreement,[14] constantly waved in their hands the Bagdad weapon." This resentment was fortified by the knowledge that those who opposed the Bagdad Railway were those who believed that the Sick Man would die and were interested in the division of his inheritance. From these Powers Turkey could accept no tutelage!

From the Turkish point of view, the best test of the wisdom of supporting the German railway concessions in Turkey was an examination of the results achieved in improving political and economic conditions in the Ottoman Empire. By 1914 the Anatolian Railways and part of the Bagdad Railway had been in existence a sufficient length of time to appraise their worth to Asia Minor, and the