Is the same fate [he asks] to be meted out to the French railways in Syria as that which has overtaken the non-German railways in Asia Minor? Are they to be absorbed into the Bagdad Railway, or be cut off from any prospects of development? On the further side of the area, are the British communications up the Tigris to be starved into submission, and is the trade of Manchester and our great industrial centers to be placed at the mercy of variable by-laws in the statutes of railway companies owned or largely controlled by Germany? In the present temper of British diplomacy, a German victory of this kind is, I am sorry to say, not outside the bounds of possibility, however momentous may be the consequences, not only to our trade but also to our whole political future. If it be achieved, German enterprise will dominate the countries west of India and will extend along two great arms to the frontiers of Egypt and to the head of the Persian Gulf. Regions lying upon the main line of the maritime communications of the British Empire will gradually, but none the less irrevocably, become invested with a political complexion and bias out of harmony with our vital interests.[164] But this was not all. Judging by the articles that filled the English press after the concession for building the Bagdad Railway had been granted to Germany, the great fear of many in England was that this concession would lead to a protectorate over Turkey by the Teutonic Powers;[165] that it “would permanently diminish English credit in the East and throughout all Islam” and exalt German prestige at Britain’s expense; that it involved the ousting of England from their “former political and commercial primacy in the Ottoman Empire”; that, to quote a British writer, it would “squeeze us out of Asiatic Turkey,” as the diplomacy of Germany had “succeeded in squeezing us out of East Africa where we surrendered to her territory which was ours by virtue of having been explored by Speke, Grant and Stanley.”[166]