Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/286



Railway Company, regarding navigation and port and terminal facilities on the Tigris and Euphrates; the agreement between the Smyrna-Aidin Railway and the Bagdad Railway regarding important extensions to the former line.
 * jects; the agreements between Lord Inchcape and the Bagdad

9. Great Britain and Germany agreed to "use their good offices with the Imperial Ottoman Government to the end that the Shatt-el-Arab shall be brought into a satisfactory navigable condition and permanently maintained in such condition, so that ocean-going ships may always be assured of free and easy access to the port of Basra, and, further, that the shipping on the Shatt-el-Arab shall always be open to ocean-going ships under the same conditions to ships of all nations, regardless of the nationality of the ships or their cargo."

10. It was agreed, finally, that any differences of opinion resulting from the convention or its appended documents should be subject to arbitration. If the signatory Powers were unable to agree upon an arbitrator or a special court of arbitration, the case was to be submitted to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.

From both the German and the British points of view the foregoing convention was an admirable solution of the Turkish problem. Had the agreement been reached ten years earlier, it might have avoided estrangement between the two nations. Had it come at almost any other time than on the eve of the Great War, it would have been a powerful stimulus to an Anglo-German rapprochement.

Germany, it is true, was obliged to abandon any hope of establishing a port on the Persian Gulf. But there were grave uncertainties that Koweit could ever be developed as a commercially profitable terminus for the Bagdad Railway, whereas its very possession by a German company would have been a constant source of irritation to Great Britain. Basra, on the other hand, had obvious advantages. Like many of the great harbors of the world—Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp, London, New York—it was on a river, rather than the open sea; and inasmuch as Great Britain had agreed that the freedom of the open sea should be applied to the Shatt-el-Arab, German ships