British imperialists, too, had excellent reason to fear that any increase in the power of the Sultan, such as would be certain to follow the construction of adequate rail communications in the Ottoman Empire, might be but the first step in a renaissance of Mohammedan political ambitions, and, perhaps, a Moslem uprising everywhere against Christian overlords. Such a situation—had it been sufficiently matured before the outbreak of the War of 1914—might have been disastrous to the British position in the East: a rejuvenated Turkey, supported by a powerful Germany, might have been in a position to menace the Suez Canal, “the spinal cord of the Empire,” and to lend assistance to seditious uprisings in Egypt, India, and the Middle East. Why should Britain not have been disturbed at such a prospect, when prominent German publicists were boastfully announcing that this was one of the principal reasons for official espousal of the _Bagdadbahn_?[33] Why should British statesmen have closed their eyes to such a possibility, when the recognized parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany warned the members of the Reichstag that limits must be placed upon the political ramifications of the Bagdad enterprise, lest it lead to a disastrous war with Great Britain?[34] Furthermore, British statesmen were too intimately acquainted with the dynamics of capitalistic imperialism to accept the assurances of Germans that the Bagdad Railway, and other German enterprises in Turkey, were business propositions only. They knew that promises to respect the sovereignty of the Sultan were courteous formalities of European diplomatists to cloak scandalous irregularities—it was in full recognition of the sacred and inviolable integrity of Turkey that Disraeli had taken possession and assumed the “defence” of Cyprus in 1878! Furthermore, experienced imperialists knew full well that economic penetration was the foundation of political control. As Mr. Lloyd George informed the House of Commons in 1911, the kilometric guarantee of the Bagdad Railway gave German bankers a firm grip on the public treasury in Turkey, and such a hold on the imperial Ottoman purse-strings might lead no one could prophesy where.[35]