Complicating and bewildering as the Near Eastern question always has been, the construction of the Anatolian and Bagdad Railways made it the more complicating and bewildering. The development of rail transportation in the Ottoman Empire was certain to raise a new crop of problems: the strategic problem of adjusting military preparations to meet new conditions; the economic problem of exploiting the great natural wealth of Turkey-in-Asia; the political problem of prescribing for a “Sick Man” who was determined to take iron as a tonic. These problems, of course, were international as well as Ottoman in their aspects. The economic and diplomatic advance of Germany in the Near East, the resurgent power of Turkey, the military coöperation between the Governments of the Kaiser and the Sultan were not matters which the other European powers were disposed to overlook. Russia, pursuing her time-honored policy, objected to any bolstering up of the Ottoman Empire. France looked with alarm upon the advent of another power in Turkish financial affairs and, in addition, was desirous of promoting the political ambitions of her ally, Russia. Great Britain became fearful of the safety of her communications with India and Egypt. Thus the Bagdad Railway overstepped the bounds of Turco-German relationships and became an international diplomatic problem. It was a concern of foreign offices as well as counting houses, of statesmen and soldiers as well as engineers and bankers. The year 1888 ushered in an epoch of three decades during which two cross-currents were at work in Turkey. On the one hand, earnest efforts were made by Turks, old and young, to bring about the political and economic regeneration of their country. On the other, the steady growth of Balkan nationalism, the relentless pressure of European imperialism, and the devastation of the Great War gradually reduced to ruins the once great empire of Suleiman the Magnificent. The history of those three decades is concerned largely with the struggles of European capitalists to acquire profitable concessions in Asiatic Turkey and of European diplomatists to control the finances, the vital routes of communication, and even the administrative powers of the Ottoman Government. The coincidence between the economic motives of the investors and the political and strategical motives of the statesmen, made Turkey one of the world’s foremost areas of imperial friction. Its territories and its natural wealth were “stakes of diplomacy” for which cabinets maneuvered on the diplomatic checkerboard and for which the flower of the world’s manhood fought on the sands of Mesopotamia, the cliffs of Gallipoli, and the plains of Flanders. To tell the story of the Bagdad Railway is to emphasize perhaps the most important single factor in the history of Turkey during the last thirty eventful years. CHAPTER II BACKWARD TURKEY INVITES ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION TURKISH SOVEREIGNTY IS A POLITE FORMALITY