Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/73

 mills with cotton of superior quality; a country which in ancient times was fabulously wealthy in agricultural products; a country which gave promise of developing into a rich market for western commodities. Communication with this wonderland was to be established by a German-controlled railway upon which service could be maintained in time of war, as in time of peace, without the aid of naval power. What greater inducements could have been offered to German imperialists, living in an imperialist world? Turkey was destined to fall within the economic orbit of an industrialized Germany!

A distinguished German publicist said in 1903, "From the German point of view, it would be unparalleled stupidity if we did not most energetically do our part to acquire a share in the revival of the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Babylonia. What we do not do others will surely do—be they British, French, or Russian; and the increased economic advantage which, through the Bagdad Railway, will accrue to us in the Nearer East would otherwise not only fail to be ours, but would serve to strengthen our rivals in diplomacy and business."[38] Some years later, in the midst of the Great War, an American writer expressed much the same point of view: "Hemmed in on the west by Great Britain and France and on the east by Russia, born too late to extend their political sovereignty over vast colonial domains, and unable (if only for lack of coaling stations) to develop sea power greater than that of their rivals, nothing was more natural than the German and Austro-Hungarian conception of a Drang nach Osten through the Balkan Peninsula, over the bridge of Constantinople, into the markets of Asia. The geographical position of the Central European states made as inevitable a penetration policy into the Balkans and Turkey as the geographical position of England made inevitable the development of an overseas empire."[39] Karl