This is a feeling which, as the history of recent events will show you, is not shared by the Government or reflected in official circles. But of its intensity outside those circles, for the moment, there can be no doubt; at the present moment coöperation in any enterprise which could be represented, or, I might more justly say, _mis_represented, as German will meet with a violent hostility which our government has to consider.... The anti-German feeling prevailed with the majority; London having really gone into a frenzy on the matter, owing to the newspaper campaign which it would have been quite impossible to counteract or influence.[168] As a result of an important meeting of Potsdam between the Czar and the Kaiser in November 1910, Russia waived all share in the Bagdad Railway. The reason for this withdrawal was, it is asserted, the willingness of Germany to allow Russia to build a railway in the north of Persia which should eventually connect with a branch of the Bagdad Railway at Khanakin on the Persian frontier. The reason, therefore, why the Bagdad Railway was not internationalized, as was the desire of Dr. Siemens and his associates, is manifest. The nations constituting the _Entente Cordiale_ were unwilling to accept the offer of the _concessionaires_, who thereafter proceeded to construct the line without outside assistance.[169] When the statesmen and financiers of France and England found that internationalization of the Bagdad Railway was impossible and that the Germans were preparing to build it without their coöperation they bethought themselves of killing the enterprise by creating a financial vacuum: “Let a vacuum of capital be created around the Bagdad Railway,” ironically writes M. André Geraud, who had no sympathy with the methods his countrymen and their English allies had adopted in their dealings with the German _concessionaires_, “let the Anglo-French air-pump be set in action, and then, as soon as the pecuniary oxygen becomes rarefied, the Bagdad Railway will be seen to languish and die.”[170] But this method, it was soon discovered, utterly failed to have the desired effect. It neither deprived the railway company of resources nor checked its activity. “The air-pump,” as M. Geraud wittily remarks, “broke down as soon as it was started.”[171] The time had passed when it could be truthfully said that the Bagdad Railway could not be built by a single power. The same statement had been made regarding the Suez Canal, but France, under the lead of De Lesseps, showed what the enterprise and the genius of her people were capable of accomplishing when they were united in an undertaking that was to reflect on them imperishable glory and redound at the same time to the welfare of humanity.