In France, the predominant position of power and influence acquired by Germany was interpreted as a complete subversion of the Eastern Question and as an event which made the solution of this long-standing question correspondingly difficult--“_ce qui boulverse complètment les données du problème et par consequent sa solution possible_.”[161] France [writes M. Aublé] had long been the disinterested protector of a nation whose moral and material elevation she had constantly sought and had spent in all branches of human activity of that unfortunate country many milliards of francs. What she loved to regard as a second France, she saw with sorrow was about to escape her and come under the influence of a hated rival.[162] Russia’s attitude toward the Bagdad Railway was no less hostile. It had, for obvious reasons, been her policy since the time of Peter the Great to weaken and eventually dismember the Ottoman Empire. Her objection to the road was that it contributed immeasurably to the financial, political, and strategical strength of Turkey, and that this would completely foil all her well-laid plans for her ultimate partition. She also regarded the road as a menace to Transcaucasia, but, more than this, she feared that it would, in the possession of Germany, halt her further advance into Western Asia and prove, mayhap, a stepping-stone to Germany’s annexation of Asia Minor. But the resentment of Great Britain was far greater than that of either France or Russia. She had more at stake and greater reasons for serious apprehension for the future. So long as she controlled the Suez Canal and there was no competing line towards India she felt secure. But when, in 1888, Baron Hirsch’s Railroad through the Balkan Peninsula was completed to the Bosphorus and connected Constantinople with Western Europe, and steps were taken to extend this line through Anatolia and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, alarm, bordering on dismay, took possession of her publicists and statesmen. The political and military importance of an overland railway from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf which could not be reached by a hostile fleet could not be overestimated. Indeed [as a noted English authority wrote in 1917] so long as the forts of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus remain intact the Sultan and his allies enjoy the advantages of a naval power in a limited area--the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles--without the possession of a fleet. This enables the Sultan and his Germanic allies rapidly to convey troops or foodstuffs from Europe to Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia and _vice versa_, in the very face of the Allied Fleets, which are powerless to interfere in areas protected by defences which had proved, as one had to expect they would prove, impregnable.[163] Another English writer saw in German control of the Bagdad Railway the doom of English trade and French enterprise in the Near East.