Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/252

 appraisal thus arrived at would be a fair prognostication of the value of the entire system when it should be opened to operation.

Dr. von Gwinner, in justification of the Bagdad Railway enterprise, summarized what he believed to be the chief services of the Anatolian Railways to Turkey. "More than twenty years ago," he wrote in 1909, "my predecessor, the late George von Siemens, conceived the idea of restoring to civilization the great wastes of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, once and for long the center of the history of humanity. The only means of achieving that end was by building railways; this was undertaken, slowly but persistently, and with marvelous results. Constantinople and the Turkish army at that time were eating bread made from Russian flour; they are now eating grain of their own country's growth. Security in Asia Minor at that time was hardly greater than it is to-day in Kurdistan. When the Deutsche Bank's engineers reached a station a little beyond Ismid (Nikomedia) on the Sea of Marmora, the neighborhood was infested by Tscherkess robbers; the chief of those robbers is now a stationmaster of the Anatolian Railway Company, drawing about £100 per annum, a party as respectable as the late Mr. Micawber after his conversion to thrift. The railways brought ease to the peasantry, who are obtaining for their harvest twice to four times the price formerly paid, and the railways have brought revenue to the Treasury. The Anatolian Railway's lines are in as good condition as any line in the United Kingdom, and their transportation charge is less than half the rates of any railway in England."[15]

Although this was the statement of an avowed protagonist of the Anatolian Railway, the testimony of other observers must lead to the conclusion that it was not an overestimate of the value of the Anatolian system. As