The Bagdad Railway was not without friends in France. The French chairman of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and served on the Board of Directors of the Bagdad Railway Company, for he believed that widespread railway construction was essential to the establishment, upon a firm basis, of Turkish credit. The French-controlled Imperial Ottoman Bank, as early as 1899, had agreed to participate in the financing of the Bagdad line, and an officer of the bank had accepted the position of vice-president of the Bagdad Railway Company at the time of its incorporation in 1903. The French owners of important railways in Anatolia and Syria believed it would be suicidal for them to obstruct the plans of the _Deutsche Bank_ and preferred to coöperate with the German concessionaires. Unless the French opponents of the Bagdad Railway were prepared to offer these interests material compensation for resisting its construction, it was hardly likely that, hard-headed business men as they were, they would jeopardize the security of their investments for the sake of such intangible items as international prestige and protectorates of missions. There were two important groups of French-owned railways in Turkey-in-Asia. In Anatolia there was the important Smyrna-Cassaba system, extending east and north-east from the French-developed port of Smyrna. At Afiun Karahissar the main line of this system from Smyrna connected with the Anatolian line from Constantinople to Konia. Therefore a route for French trade already existed to all of Asia Minor; and when the Bagdad Railway was completed, direct service could be instituted from Smyrna to Adana, Aleppo, Mosul, Bagdad, and Basra. The second group of French railways was the Syrian system, owned by _La Société Ottomane du Chemin de fer Damas-Hama et Prolongements_. This company operated railway lines from Aleppo to Damascus, from Tripoli to Homs, from Beirut to Damascus, from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and between other less important points. After the completion of the Bagdad Railway this group of railways would have direct connections, at Aleppo, with all of Europe _via_ Constantinople and with the Indies _via_ Basra and the Persian Gulf. Perhaps the French interests controlling these railways were chagrined at their inability to secure the trans-Mesopotamian concession for themselves. But faced with the _fait accompli_ of the German concession, they realized that coöperation with the Bagdad Railway would make their lines an integral part of a greater system of rail communications within Turkey and also between Turkey and the nations of Europe and Farther Asia. Refusal to coöperate would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces.[34]