Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/274

 French people at Agadir to fill the pockets of financiers whose names are unknown outside Constantinople or the Paris Bourse The Ottoman Empire is shaken, and the cosmopolitan financier is now staking out the land into spheres of interest. An empire may survive disaster, but it cannot survive exploitation. A country like Turkey, without legislative capacity, without understanding what the economics of Europe mean and at the same time rich, is a lamb for the slaughter."[19]

This trenchant criticism of French policy might have been taken more seriously had Great Britain herself been actuated by magnanimous impulses. Instead, British financiers were joining the common scramble for concessions, and British statesmen were pursuing with ruthless avidity every means of protecting British imperial interests.

The Bagdad negotiations of 1910-1911 between Sir Ernest Cassel and Dr. von Gwinner, on the one hand, and the British and Ottoman Governments, on the other, came to naught, it will be recalled, because of the refusal of Sir Edward Grey to consent to an increase in the Turkish customs duties. The Sublime Porte was unwilling to grant the economic concessions demanded by Great Britain as the price of her assistance in Ottoman financial stabilization. But the Young Turks were shrewd enough to keep the door open for further negotiations by removing the chief political objection of England to the Bagdad enterprise—namely, that it menaced British imperial interests in the region of the Persian Gulf. In the convention of March 21, 1911, with the Bagdad Railway Company, the Ottoman Government reserved to itself considerable latitude in the disposition of the sections of the line beyond Bagdad.[20]