fully informed of the British plans and expressed his pleasure at the consummation of the transaction. Thus, after twenty years of diplomatic bargaining, British imperialists had won possession of the "short cut to India"![36] Should Great Britain succeed in establishing her point that the Bank für orientalischen Eisenbahnen is a neutral Swiss, rather than enemy German, corporation and therefore exempt from seizure under the reparations provisions of the Treaty of Versailles; and should the Chester concessions be recognized as superseding the rights of the Black Sea Railways, French interests in the Levant will face a powerful Anglo-American competition which it will be very difficult for them to combat with any degree of success.[37] And the power of the French Government is so heavily invested in the Ruhr occupation that it is doubtful if it can do anything at all to coerce the Turks into full recognition of French claims.
Kaleidoscopic indeed have been the changes in the Near East since the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The economic and political power of Germany in Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia has been completely destroyed. The Ottoman Empire has disappeared, and in its place has risen a republican Nationalist Turkey. Tsarist Russia, with its consuming desire for aggrandizement in the Caucasus, in Asia Minor, and at the Straits, has given way to a proletarian Russia which foreswears imperialist ambition. Italy, which sought to transform the Adriatic and the Ægean into Italian lakes, has finally been compelled to recognize that she assumed imperial liabilities out of all proportion to her economic resources. France, after achieving a temporary victory in the New Turkey, has had to surrender her position to more powerful competitors. But Great Britain has emerged from the conflict in all her glory. She has obtained possession of another
