Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/341

 the Entente of 1904—was resumed in all its former intensity. The Entente, in fact, had been formed because of common fear of Germany, rather than because of coincidence of colonial interests; and with that fear removed, the foundation of effective coöperation had been undermined.[6] The Great War may be said to have terminated the first episode of the great Bagdad Railway drama—the rise and fall of German power in the Near East; it opened a second episode, which promises to be equally portentous—an Anglo-French struggle for the right of accession to the exalted position which Germany formerly occupied in the realm of the Turks.

Anglo-French rivalry in the Near East will not be an unprecedented phenomenon. "Since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, France and Great Britain have never fought in the Levant with naval and military weapons (though they have several times been on the verge of open war), but their struggle has been real and bitter for all that, and though it has not here gone the length of empire-building, it has not been confined to trade. Its characteristic fields have been diplomacy and culture, its entrenchments embassies, consulates, religious missions, and schools. It has flared up on the Upper Nile, in Egypt, on the Isthmus of Suez, in Palestine, in the Lebanon, at Mosul, at the Dardanelles, at Salonica, in Constantinople. The crises of 1839-41 and 1882 over Egypt and of 1898 over the Egyptian Sudan are landmarks on a road that has never been smooth, for conflicts [of one sort or another] have perpetually kept alive the combative instinct in French and English missionaries, schoolmasters, consuls, diplomatists, civil servants, ministers of state, and journalists. One cannot understand—or make allowances for—the post-war relations of the French and British Governments over the 'Eastern Question' unless one realizes this tradition of