The position of France in the Bagdad Railway controversy was anomalous. In addition to political, economic, and religious reasons for opposing the construction of the trans-Mesopotamian railway, the French had many historical and sentimental interests which influenced the Government of the Republic to resist German penetration in the Near East. French patriots recalled with pride the rôle of France in the Crusades; they remembered that Palestine itself was once a Latin kingdom; they believed that Christians in the Levant looked to France as their protector and that this protection had received formal recognition under the Capitulations, negotiated by Francis I and renewed and extended by his successors from Henry IV to Louis XV. They knew that the French language was the language not only of the educated classes in Turkey, but, also, in Syria, of the traders, so that it could be said that a traveler in Syria might almost consider himself in a French dependency. They were proud of the fact that the term “Frank” was the symbol of Western civilization in the Near East. They were aware of the far-reaching educational work of French missionaries. France, to their mind, had done a great work of Christian enlightenment in the Moslem stronghold, Turkey. Was the Government of the Republic to be backward in asserting the interests of France, when Bourbons and Bonapartes had so ably paved the way for the extension of French civilization in the Holy Land? Reasoning of this kind was popular in France during 1898 and 1899, when the Kaiser’s visit to Abdul Hamid was still under discussion and when the first indications were given that a German company was to be awarded a concession for the construction of a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf.