Because of the refusal of the Powers to permit an increase in the customs, the Turkish Government was unable to assign further revenues to the payment of railway guarantees. The Bagdad Railway Company thereupon agreed to proceed with the construction of the sections from El Helif to Bagdad without additional commitments from the Imperial Ottoman Treasury. The Company likewise renounced its right to build the sections beyond Bagdad, including its concession for the construction of port works at Basra, with the proviso, however, that this section of the line, if constructed, be assigned to a Turkish company internationally owned and administered.[37] This surrender by the Bagdad Railway Company of its rights to the pledge of additional revenues by the Ottoman Treasury and its surrender of its hold on the sections of the railway beyond Bagdad are by far the most important provisions of the conventions of March 21, 1911. German opinion, as a whole, considered these self-denying contracts of the Company an indication of the willingness of the _Deutsche Bank_ and the German Government to go more than half way in removing diplomatic objections to the construction of the Bagdad Railway.[38] There were Englishmen, however, who felt that the conventions of 1911 were a mere gesture of conciliation; in their opinion the renunciation of these important rights was bait held out to win foreign diplomatic support and to induce the participation of foreign capital in the Railway and its subsidiary enterprises. Lord Curzon, for example, expressed to the House of Lords his belief that technical and financial difficulties made it impossible for the German bankers to proceed with the construction of the Bagdad line without the assistance of outside capital. He was firmly of the opinion that no railway stretching from the Bosporus to the Gulf could be financed by a single Power.[39]