British experience in Egypt, however, indicated one direction in which it might possibly lead. English control in Egypt had been acquired by the most modern and approved imperial methods. It was no old-fashioned conquest; the procedure was much more subtle than that. First, Egypt was weighted down by a great burden of debt to British capitalists; then British business men and investors acquired numerous privileges and intrenched themselves in their special position by virtue of the Anglo-French control of Egyptian finance; the “advice” of British diplomatists came to possess greater force of law than the edicts of the Khedive; “disorders” always could be counted upon to furnish an excuse for military conquest and annexation, should that crude procedure eventually become necessary.[36] Might not _Wilhelmstrasse_ tear a leaf out of Downing Street’s book of imperial experience? There is a seeming inconsistency in this description of the British interests involved in the Bagdad Railway question. If British shipping might be seriously injured, if the imperial communications were to be endangered, if undisputed control of the Persian Gulf was essential to the safety of the Empire, if the defence of India was to be jeopardized, if a German protectorate might be established in Asia Minor—if all these were possibilities, how could the Balfour Government afford to temporize with the German concessionaires, holding out the hope of British assistance? Were Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne less fearful for the welfare and safety of the Empire than were the newspaper editors? Rather, of course, were they convinced that the very best way of forestalling any of these developments was to permit and encourage British participation in the financing of the Bagdad Railway Company.[37] Only thus could British trade hope to share in the economic renaissance of the Ottoman Empire; only thus could there be British representatives on the Board of Directors to insist that the _Deutsche Bank_ confine its efforts to the economic development of Turkey, excluding all political _arrières pensées_. And it would not have required an imperialist of the experience of Mr. Balfour to imagine that dual ownership of the Bagdad Railway might have the same ultimate outcome as the Dual Control in Egypt. But blind antagonism toward Germany prevented the average Englishman from seeing the obvious advantages of not abandoning the Bagdad Railway to the exclusive control of German and French capitalists. BRITISH RESISTANCE IS STIFFENED BY THE ENTENTE