House of Commons, presided over by Sir Stafford Northcote, was appointed "to examine and report upon the whole subject of railway communication between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf." This committee reported that the construction of a trans-Mesopotamian railway was a matter of urgent imperial concern and recommended a plan which would have involved the investment of some £10,000,000. The necessity of providing an alternative route to India was obviated, however, by Disraeli's purchase, in 1875, of a controlling interest in the Suez Canal at a cost of less than half that sum.[4]
For the forty years during which, at intervals, these projects were under discussion Germany was not even an interested spectator in Near Eastern affairs. Domestic problems of economic development and national unification were all-absorbing, and capitalistic imperialism was quite outside the scope of German policies. France and Russia, not Germany, were the disturbers of British tranquillity in the Orient.
When during the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a marked increase of German political and economic interests in the Ottoman Empire, there was little disposition in England to resent the German advance. As late as 1899, the year in which the preliminary Bagdad Railway concession was awarded to German financiers, British opinion, on the whole, was well disposed to Teutonic peaceful penetration in the Near East. The press was delighted at the prospect that the advent of the Germans in Turkey would block Russian expansion in the Middle East. Such eminent imperialists as Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes announced their willingness to conclude an entente with Germany in colonial affairs. The British Government was more suspicious of France than of Germany.[5]
