economic needs of the countries through which they pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic needs of native Governments.
However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development of the East, and this is precisely what it did not receive. Germany backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.
As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German railhead, it would have cut the Government of India's only line of communication with Teheran and would have menaced
