[21] The Hedjaz Railway was a great national enterprise which indicated the strength of Moslem feeling in Turkey and which proved the desire of the Ottoman Government to construct national railways as far as capital and technical skill could be obtained. So far as Abdul Hamid was concerned, the railway was an attempt to gain prestige for his claim to the Caliphate, as well as a move to strengthen his political position in Syria and the Hedjaz. In April, 1900, the Sultan announced to the Faithful his determination to construct a railway from Damascus to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. An appeal was issued to Mohammedans the world over for funds to carry out the work. The Sultan headed the list with a subscription of about a quarter of a million dollars, and by 1904 over three and a half million dollars had been collected. The only compulsory contributions were the levies of 10% on the salary of every official in the civil and military service of the empire. It is estimated that the contributions eventually amounted to almost fifteen million dollars. The engineers in charge of the construction were Italians, although the great bulk of the work was done by the army and the peasantry. Nearly seven hundred thousand persons were employed on the construction work at one time or another, the non-Moslems being replaced as quickly as Mussulmans could be trained to take their places. On August 31, 1908, the thirty-second anniversary of the accession of Abdul Hamid, the railway was completed to Medina, where construction was halted temporarily because of the Young Turk Revolution and the international complications which followed it. _Corps de droit ottoman_, Volume IV, pp. 242–244; A. Hamilton, _Problems of the Middle East_ (London, 1909), pp. 273–292; _Annual Register_, 1908, pp. 328–329. [22] Quoted by Hamilton, _op. cit._, pp. 274–275. [23] _Via_ the Bagdad Railway and the Syrian system Turkish troops could have been transported to a point less than 200 miles from Suez. A successful attack on the Canal, of course, would have severed British communications with the East. In addition, it would have given the Sultan an opportunity to attack, and assert his suzerainty over, Egypt. Dr. Rohrbach made a great point of this alleged menace to the British position in Egypt. _Cf._ _Die Bagdadbahn_, pp. 18–19; _German World Policies_, pp. 165–167. This program, however, would have been an altogether too ambitious one for the military strength of the Ottoman Empire, which had such far-flung frontiers to defend. In any event, British statesmen seemed to realize that the Sinai Peninsula was a formidable natural defence against an attack on the Suez Canal and that such an expedition would be merely a pin-prick in the imperial flesh. _Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords_, fifth series, Volume 7 (1911), pp. 601 _et seq._ The termination in a fiasco of the Turkish drive of 1914–1915 against the Canal confirmed this prophecy.