There was some harsh criticism in Great Britain, however, of the advantages which France had obtained for herself in the Ottoman Empire. Sir Mark Sykes, an eminent student of Near Eastern affairs, believed that the new state of affairs was worse than the old. Speaking in the House of Commons, March 18, 1914, he warned the Foreign Office that “the policy of French financiers will produce eventually the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.... Take the proposed loan arranged with the French Government, for something over £20,000,000. In order to get this there are concessions which I cannot help feeling are more brazen and more fatal than any I have seen. The existing railways in Syria meander for miles to avoid legitimate profits in order to extort a guarantee. Alongside these railways you can see the merchants’ merchandise and the peasants’ produce rotting because the railway people do not trouble to warehouse the stuff or to shift it. They have got their guarantee, and they do not care. These concessions, which have been extracted from Turkey, mean a monopoly of all Syrian transit; and, further, a native press is to be subventioned practically in the interest of these particular monopolies.... In practice, loans, kilometric guarantees, monopolies, and a financed native press must, whether the financiers desire it or not, pave the way to annexation. I submit that this is not the spirit of the _entente_. The British people did not stand by the French people at Agadir to fill the pockets of financiers whose names are unknown outside Constantinople or the Paris Bourse.... The Ottoman Empire is shaken, and the cosmopolitan financier is now staking out the land into spheres of interest. An empire may survive disaster, but it cannot survive exploitation. A country like Turkey, without legislative capacity, without understanding what the economics of Europe mean and at the same time rich, is a lamb for the slaughter.”[19] This trenchant criticism of French policy might have been taken more seriously had Great Britain herself been actuated by magnanimous impulses. Instead, British financiers were joining the common scramble for concessions, and British statesmen were pursuing with ruthless avidity every means of protecting British imperial interests. THE YOUNG TURKS CONCILIATE GREAT BRITAIN