Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/26

 it became the source of bitter international rivalries which contributed to the outbreak of the Great War. It is one of the tragedies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Suez Canal, and the Bagdad Railway—potent instruments of civilization for the promotion of peaceful progress and material prosperity—could not have been constructed without occasioning imperial friction, political intrigues, military alliances, and armed conflict.

The geographical position of the Ottoman Empire, the enormous potential wealth of its dominions, and the political instability of the Sultan's Government contributed to make the Bagdad Railway one of the foremost imperial problems of the twentieth century. At the time of the Bagdad Railway concession of 1903 Turkey held dominion over the Asiatic threshold of Europe, Anatolia, and the European threshold of Asia, the Balkan Peninsula. Constantinople, the capital of the empire, was the economic and strategic center of gravity for the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean basins. By possession of northern Syria and Mesopotamia, the Sultan controlled the "central route" of Eastern trade throughout its entire length from the borders of Austria-Hungary to the shores of the Persian Gulf. The contiguity of Ottoman territory to the Sinai Peninsula and to Persia held out the possibility of a Turkish attack on the Suez and trans-Persian routes to India and the Far East. In fact, the Sultan's dominions from Macedonia to southern Mesopotamia constituted a broad avenue of communication, an historic world highway, between the Occident and the Orient. To a strong nation, this position would have been a source of strength. To a weak nation it was a source of weakness. As Gibraltar and Suez and Panama were staked out by the empire-builders, so were Constantinople and Smyrna and Koweit. Strategically, the region traversed