Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/256

 certain districts the amount of the tithes collected in 1908 was five or six times as great as the yield before the construction of the Railway.[22]

The economic prospects of Turkey never were brighter than they were just before the outbreak of the Great War. The new régime had removed many of the vexatious restrictions on individual initiative which had characterized the rule of Abdul Hamid. The country's losses in men in the Italian and Balkan wars had been made up by an immigration of Moslem refugees from the ceded territories. Numerous concessions had been granted for the exploitation of mines, the construction of public utilities, and the improvement of the means of communication. "There was a feeling abroad in the land that an era of exceptional commercial and industrial activity was about to dawn upon Turkey." The Ottoman Empire was in a fair way to become modernized according to Western standards.[23]

Thus the Anatolian and Bagdad Railways achieved all that was claimed for them by their sponsors. They increased political security in Asia Minor; they brought about an economic renaissance in the homeland of the Turks; they justified the investment of public funds which was necessary to bring the system to completion. Beyond the Amanus Mountains lay the plains of Syria and the great unexploited wealth of Mesopotamia. A development of Mesopotamia, even as modest as that achieved in Anatolia, would pay the cost of the Bagdad Railway many times over. Were the Ottoman statesmen who supported this great project to be condemned for so great a service to their country? Or would they have been short-sighted had they failed to realize the great potentialities of railway construction in Asiatic Turkey? That the Bagdad Railway contributed to the causes of Turkish participation in the Great War—and to the disintegration of the Otto