The ancient highroad of the world [he declares] is the one which leads from Europe to India--the road used by Alexander--the highway which leads from the Danube _via_ Constantinople to the valley of the Euphrates, and by northern Persia, Herat, and Kabul to the Ganges. Every yard of the Bagdad Railway which is laid brings the owner of the railway nearer to India. What Alexander performed and Napoleon undoubtedly planned can be achieved by a third treading in their footsteps. England views the Bagdad Railway as a very real and threatening danger to herself--and rightly so. She can never undo or annul its effects.[176] The increasingly hostile attitude of the _Entente Cordiale_ toward the Bagdad Railway, the violent ebullitions of the press of the rival powers portended trouble. No sooner had the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway been officially announced than it began to weigh as a nightmare on a great part of Europe. The chancelleries of the Old World began then to realize more clearly than ever before the boundless possibilities of the great oriental highway. English statesmen saw in it the virtual doubling of the German fleet at the head of the Persian Gulf, and then the cry was heard throughout Britain, “Let us have the Russians at Constantinople rather than a great power on the Persian Gulf.” The Bagdad Railway [declares an English writer] was a _damnosa hæreditas_, which was due as much to a lack of imagination and effective organization on the part of our business community in the eighties and nineties of the last century, as it undoubtedly was to a mistaken policy in those critical years on the part of the British Government.[177] Small wonder, then, is it that the Bagdad Railway was from the very beginning of the great World War considered as one of the chief contributing causes of the terrific cataclysm of the second decade of the twentieth century and that, whatever political, economic, and social adjustments may be entailed as a result of the most stupendous struggle of history, it is destined to modify even more profoundly the relations between the Orient and the Occident than did the far-reaching campaigns of Alexander the Great, which introduced Greek people and Greek culture to the East and made known to the West the riches and the wonders of Persia and India and Babylonia. CHAPTER VIII IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE CRUSADERS _Nations melt_ _From power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt_ _The sunshine for a while, and downward go_ _Like lauwine loosened from the mountain’s belt._ BYRON “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV, 12.