Many of the charges brought against the Bagdad Railway by the British shipping interests could not have been substantiated. As early as 1892, Lord Curzon stated emphatically that, for most commercial purposes, a trans-Mesopotamian railway would be next to valueless. “If I were a stockholder in the P. & O. [the Peninsular and Oriental, one of the Inchcape lines touching at Indian and Persian Gulf ports], I would not,” he said, “except for the possible loss of the mails, be in the least alarmed at the competition of such a railway.”[17] Informed Germans, likewise, did not consider the Bagdad Railway a serious competitor to the Suez Canal. One authority, for example, wrote: “The Bagdad Railway taken as a whole is of importance only for through passenger and postal traffic (in which respect, therefore, it is of greatest value to the British in their communications with India) and occasionally for fast freight. The great bulk of the freight traffic, on the other hand, carrying the import and export trade of the East, hardly can fall to the Bagdad Railway, which, for a long time at least, must content itself with the local traffic of certain sections of the line,” particularly in Cilicia, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia.[18] The assertion that the cost of constructing and operating the line would be borne by British commerce was based upon specious reasoning. Higher customs duties would not be paid by the British merchant, but by the Turkish consumer. The only harmful effect of the increased duties would be a general increase of prices of imported commodities in Turkey, leading, perhaps, to a lesser demand for foreign goods. It was probable, on the other hand, that this slight disadvantage would be more than offset by the wider prosperity which the Railway was almost certain to bring the districts traversed. In any event, whatever burden might be saddled upon the import trade would have to be borne, in proportion to the volume of business transacted, by the competitors of British merchants as well as by British merchants themselves.