Many British business men were shrewd enough to foresee that the Bagdad Railway might prove to be far from disadvantageous to their interests. Where was the menace to British prosperity in a railway, German or otherwise, which promised improved communication with the British colonies in the Orient? The facilitation of mail service to India; the development of rapid passenger service to the East; the reduction of ocean freight rates as a result of healthy competition—all of these injured no one except the vested interests which had handicapped the expansion of British commerce by inadequate service and exorbitant rates. There was no indication that the Bagdad Railway Company proposed to discriminate against non-German shippers; in any event, such a course was specifically prohibited by the concession of 1903, which decreed that “all rates, whether they be general, special, proportional, or differential, are applicable to all travelers and consignors without distinction,” and which prohibited the Company “from entering into any special contract with the object of granting reductions of the charges specified in the tariffs.”[19] As the British Chamber of Commerce at Constantinople appropriately pointed out, the most certain means of avoiding discriminatory treatment was to permit and encourage the participation of British capital in the enterprise and to assure the presence of British subjects on the Board of Directors of the Company.[20] From an economic point of view, it would appear that the British Empire had a great deal to gain from the construction of the Bagdad Railway. In proportion as improved methods of transportation shrink the earth’s surface, the contacts between mother country and dependencies will become more numerous. An economic community of interest is more likely to spring up and thrive with the aid of more numerous and more rapid means of communication. True, certain interests believed that the Bagdad Railway threatened their very existence. But would the British people have been willing to sacrifice the wider economic interests of the Empire to the vested privileges of a handful of English capitalists? They would not, of course, if the issue had been put to them in such simple terms. The problem was complicated by the obvious fact that it was not alone the economic interests of the empire which were at stake. The political import of the Bagdad enterprise overshadowed all economic considerations. IMPERIAL DEFENCE BECOMES THE PRIMARY CONCERN