Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/84

 situation at the Porte; that the German military mission exerted a powerful influence in the final result—are more obvious than convincing. These were all contributing factors in the success of the Germans, but they were not determining factors. The reasons for the award of the concession to the Deutsche Bank were partly economic, partly strategic, partly political.

The Germans alone submitted proposals which met the demands of the Public Debt Administration and the Ottoman Government. They proposed to extend the existing Anatolian Railway from Konia, across the mountains into Cilicia and Syria, down the valley of the Tigris to Bagdad and Basra and the Persian Gulf. The railway which they had in mind would reach from one end of Asiatic Turkey to the other; in connection with the railways of southern Anatolia and of Syria, it would provide continuous railway communication between Constantinople and Smyrna in the north and west, with Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Mecca, and Mosul in the south and east. There were serious technical and financial difficulties in the construction of such a railway, it is true, but there were political and economic considerations which warranted the expenditure of whatever effort and funds might be necessary to carry the line to completion.

On the other hand, the groups other than the Germans proposed the construction of a trans-Mesopotamian railway which did not come up to specifications. They submitted plans calling for the building of a line from some Mediterranean port—such as Alexandretta or Tripoli-in-Syria—down the Euphrates valley to the Persian Gulf.[12] Such a line would have had obvious advantages, from the point of view of the concessionaires, over the projected German railway. The cost of construction would have been materially less, for it would have been unnecessary to build the costly sections across the Taurus and