A brilliant French publicist attributes the success of the Germans in securing the concession for the Bagdad Railway to the fact that the era of great ambassadors from France and England at the Sublime Porte was closed at the period in question--that in the year immediately preceding “the publication of the irade of the concession in 1899,” there was then “an utter bankruptcy of great men” at Constantinople from these two countries.[157] Opposed to the English, French, and Russian Ambassadors, and almost isolated from his colleagues, was the alert and sagacious Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the noted ambassador from Germany who, according to an anonymous writer in the _National Review_, “was the most influential of the ambassadors at Yildiz, and, in accordance with the thoroughly sensible and practical cast of German ideas as to the functions of diplomacy, had used his position more actively and successfully than any minister had done before to promote the business interest of his nationals in Turkey.”[158] Not to speak of the failure of France and Russia to secure the concession for building the Bagdad Railway, it may here be declared that England’s hopes of securing it were doomed from the very beginning. Her control of the Suez Canal and her occupation of Egypt, which was the territory of a Turkish vassal, not to speak of Gladstone’s denunciation of the Sultan as the “Great Assassin,” all predisposed Abdul-Hamid in favor of Germany and as strongly predisposed him against Great Britain. A writer in the _National Review_, referring to this subject, declares: For many years the immobile Turk had never been so likely to go out of his way for any purpose in the world as when an opportunity to do the English Government a discourtesy or English influence a disservice; and it may almost be said that even a bribe worthy of the fabulous wealth of the detested island would not have induced Abdul-Hamid to give to an Englishman what he could give to any one else.[159] When it was officially announced that the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway had been granted to a German syndicate, there was great jubilation from the Rhine to the Vistula over what was regarded as a great victory for Teutonic diplomacy and enterprise. The enthusiastic sons of the Fatherland fancied that they already saw the well-equipped trains of the Bagdad Railway “running in the track of Alexander” from the Dardanelles to the embouchure of the Shatt-el-Arab, and exulted in the thought that “where the Mermnadæ, the Achæmenidæ, and the Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Turkish conquerors failed, there Germany had a good prospect of success.”[160] In Turkey the diplomatic victory of the Germans meant a great exaltation of Teutonic prestige and a corresponding diminution of the credit and influence of the defeated Powers.