Still more fundamental, perhaps, than any of these reasons was the fear among far-sighted French diplomatists that the Bagdad Railway would be but the first step in a formal political alliance between Germany and Turkey. The French, more than any other European people, have been schooled in the political ramifications of foreign investments. The very foundations of the Russian Alliance, for example, were loans of French bankers to Russian industries and to the Tsar. Might not Baron Marschall von Bieberstein and Karl Helfferich, Prince von Bülow and Arthur von Gwinner, tear a leaf out of the book of French experience? Certainly the way was being paved for a Turco-German alliance, and M. Deschanel eloquently warned his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies that there were limitless possibilities in the situation. Speaking in the Chamber on November 19, 1903, he said: “Behold a railway that can divert from the Suez Canal a part of the traffic of the Far East, so that the railways of Central Europe will become the competitors of Marseilles and of our French railways! Behold a new colonial policy which, instead of conquering territories by force of arms, makes war with funds; possesses itself of the means of communication; crushes out the life of states, little by little, by the artifices of the financiers, leaving them only a nominal existence! And we, who possess the world’s greatest fund of _capital, that supreme weapon of modern conquest_, we propose to place it at the disposal of foreign interests hostile to our fundamental and permanent foreign policies! Alas, it is not the first time that our capital has gone to nourish rival, even hostile, schemes!”[21] Religious interests supported the political and economic objections to the construction of the Bagdad Railway. French Clericals were fearful lest this railway become the very backbone of German interests in the Ottoman Empire, thus strengthening German missionary activities and jeopardizing the time-honored protectorate of France over Catholics in the Near East. As early as 1898 an anonymous writer sounded a clarion call to Catholics and nationalists alike that German economic penetration in Turkey was a matter of their common concern: “Preeminent in the Levant, thanks to the friendship of the Sultan and to the progress of the commerce of her nationals, Germany, if she gathers in, besides, our religious heritage, will crown her formidable material power with an enormous moral power; she will assume in the world the eminent place which Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I, Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon have assured to our country. The ‘nationalization’ of missions will inaugurate a period of German supremacy in the Orient, where the name of France has been so great and where it still is so loved.”[22]