There are special and peculiar problems connected with the construction of railways in the economically backward areas of the world. In well populated regions, such as western Europe, railways have been built to accommodate existing traffic; in sparsely populated regions, such as eastern Russia and western United States, they have been constructed chiefly to create new traffic. In the economically advanced countries of the world the railway has been the result of civilization; in the backward countries it has been the outpost of civilization. A new railway in an undeveloped region is obliged at the outset to concern itself mainly with the upbuilding of the territory through which it runs, in order to assure abundant traffic for the future; during this period its receipts are rarely, if ever, adequate to meet the costs of operation. Private capital cannot be expected to assume alone the risk and burden thus involved, but the public service which the railway renders during this critical time justifies the government in subsidizing the enterprise until it can become self-supporting. The granting of state subventions has been a common practice of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China time and time again has pledged national revenues in support of railway construction; the Latin-American countries have been conspicuous exemplars of the same practice; more than half of the railways of Russia were constructed with government funds.[44] There was every reason to believe that the Bagdad Railway would be built with some system of state guarantees. Almost every railway in Asiatic Turkey at one time or another had been the recipient of a government subvention, and the proposed trans-Mesopotamian railway faced many more obstacles than had faced any then in operation. The provinces through which the Bagdad Railway was to pass were sparsely settled and were too backward, economically, to warrant the construction of a railway for the accommodation of existing traffic;[45] the German technical commission of 1899 had pointed out that the estimated gross operating revenue for some years would be entirely inadequate to pay the expenses of running trains even if there should be an unlooked for volume of passenger and mail service to India. In time, it was believed, improved transportation and greater political security would induce immigration and produce widespread economic prosperity in the provinces of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, thus assuring financial independence to the railway.[46] During the interim, however, a state guarantee appeared to be necessary.