The outcome of the negotiations for an increase in the customs duties was a keen disappointment to the Young Turks. Desirous as they were of carrying the Bagdad enterprise to a successful conclusion, they could not help resenting its political implications. “We tried,” writes Djavid Bey, “to better our relations with the English; they talked to us of the Bagdad Railway! We tried to introduce financial and economic reforms in Turkey; we found before us the Bagdad Railway! Every time an occasion arose, the French stirred up the Bagdad Railway question. Even the Russians, notwithstanding the Potsdam Agreement,[14] constantly waved in their hands the Bagdad weapon.” This resentment was fortified by the knowledge that those who opposed the Bagdad Railway were those who believed that the Sick Man would die and were interested in the division of his inheritance. From these Powers Turkey could accept no tutelage! THE GERMAN RAILWAYS JUSTIFY THEIR EXISTENCE From the Turkish point of view, the best test of the wisdom of supporting the German railway concessions in Turkey was an examination of the results achieved in improving political and economic conditions in the Ottoman Empire. By 1914 the Anatolian Railways and part of the Bagdad Railway had been in existence a sufficient length of time to appraise their worth to Asia Minor, and the appraisal thus arrived at would be a fair prognostication of the value of the entire system when it should be opened to operation. Dr. von Gwinner, in justification of the Bagdad Railway enterprise, summarized what he believed to be the chief services of the Anatolian Railways to Turkey. “More than twenty years ago,” he wrote in 1909, “my predecessor, the late George von Siemens, conceived the idea of restoring to civilization the great wastes of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, once and for long the center of the history of humanity. The only means of achieving that end was by building railways; this was undertaken, slowly but persistently, and with marvelous results. Constantinople and the Turkish army at that time were eating bread made from Russian flour; they are now eating grain of their own country’s growth. Security in Asia Minor at that time was hardly greater than it is to-day in Kurdistan. When the _Deutsche Bank’s_ engineers reached a station a little beyond Ismid (Nikomedia) on the Sea of Marmora, the neighborhood was infested by Tscherkess robbers; the chief of those robbers is now a stationmaster of the Anatolian Railway Company, drawing about £100 _per annum_, a party as respectable as the late Mr. Micawber after his conversion to thrift. The railways brought ease to the peasantry, who are obtaining for their harvest twice to four times the price formerly paid, and the railways have brought revenue to the Treasury. The Anatolian Railway’s lines are in as good condition as any line in the United Kingdom, and their transportation charge is less than half the rates of any railway in England.”[15]