abandoned.[1] Lord Palmerston, in the meantime, was busily opposing the Suez Canal project. De Lesseps was handicapped by the obstructionist policies of British diplomacy as well as by the unwillingness of British financiers to invest in his enterprise. Palmerston frankly informed the great French engineer that in the opinion of the British Government the construction of the Canal was a physical impossibility; that if it were constructed it would injure British maritime supremacy; and that, after all, it was not so much a financial and commercial venture as a political conspiracy to provide the occasion for French interference in the East![2] Nevertheless the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and immediately thereafter the question of a Mesopotamian railway was again brought to the fore in England. The advance of the Russians in the Near East and the control by the French of a short all-water route to the Indies gave rise to serious concern regarding the maintenance of communication with British India. In 1870 a British promoter proposed the construction of a railway from Alexandretta _via_ Aleppo and Mosul to Bagdad and Basra. Such a railway, as Sir William Andrew had pointed out, would assure the undisturbed possession of India, for the “advancing standard of the barbarian Cossack would recoil before those emblems of power and progress, the electric wire and the steam engine, and his ominous tread would be restrained behind the icy barrier of the Caucasus.”[3] Also it would render Great Britain independent of the French-owned Suez Canal by providing an alternative route to the East, making possible more rapid transportation of passengers, mails, and troops to India. This plan seemed desirable of execution from so many points of view that a special committee of the House of Commons, presided over by Sir Stafford Northcote, was appointed “to examine and report upon the whole subject of railway communication between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf.” This committee reported that the construction of a trans-Mesopotamian railway was a matter of urgent imperial concern and recommended a plan which would have involved the investment of some £10,000,000. The necessity of providing an alternative route to India was obviated, however, by Disraeli’s purchase, in 1875, of a controlling interest in the Suez Canal at a cost of less than half that sum.[4] For the forty years during which, at intervals, these projects were under discussion Germany was not even an interested spectator in Near Eastern affairs. Domestic problems of economic development and national unification were all-absorbing, and capitalistic imperialism was quite outside the scope of German policies. France and Russia, not Germany, were the disturbers of British tranquillity in the Orient.