Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/271

 appreciated. It was an agreement between two great financial groups in France and Germany; as such it was signed by M. Sergent, Sub-Governor of the Bank of France; M. de Klapka, Secretary-General of the Imperial Ottoman Bank; and Dr. Karl Helfferich, Managing Director of the Deutsche Bank. In addition, it was an understanding between the Governments of France and Germany; as such it was signed by M. Ponsot, of the French Embassy in Berlin, and by Herr von Rosenberg, of the German Foreign Office. A speech of Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg to the Reichstag, December 9, 1913, acknowledged the official character of the negotiations being conducted by the French and German bankers. That the French Government considered the convention a binding international agreement is made perfectly clear by a despatch of Baron Beyens, Belgian Minister in Berlin, to M. Davignon, Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, February 20, 1914, in which the attention of the Belgian Government is officially called to the existence of the convention.[15] The agreement, furthermore, was acceptable to the Ottoman Government, for the Sultan promptly confirmed the concessions for the new Black Sea and Syrian lines and for the necessary extensions to the Anatolian Railways. Much has been written about governmental support of investors in foreign countries, but, so far as the author has been able to ascertain, this is the first instance in which a financial pact and an international agreement have been combined in one document. No longer are treaties negotiated by diplomatists alone, but by diplomatists and bankers!

From the standpoint of the French interests involved, the February convention of 1914 was an eminently satisfactory settlement of the Bagdad Railway controversy. French capitalists secured concessions for more than 2,000 miles of railways in Asiatic Turkey, thus eliminating the