onduce to the maintenance of their pretensions.

As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding
underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see
how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad
Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of
the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself
admits that

"The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway cannot be described as
properly paying its way. It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from
Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Anatolian Railway with the
older railway system in the West.... The parts of Asia Minor which were
thickly populated and prosperous in antiquity lie mostly westward of
this first section of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys and"
(French and English) "railways leading down to the Aegean."

"There are other once-flourishing parts of the peninsula," he continues,
"which the Bagdad Railway does not touch at all"--the Vilayet of Sivas
and the other Armenian provinces. The original German plan was to carry
the Railway through Armenia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not
unnaturally vetoed the construction, so near her Caucasian frontiers, of
a line which, by the nature of the Turco-German understanding, must
primarily serve strategic ends[31], and the track was therefore
deflected to the south-east. This took it through the most barren parts
of Central Anatolia, and in the next section involved the slow and
costly work of tunnelling the Taurus and Amanus mountains.

"If merely economic and not political advantages were taken into
account," Dr. Rohrbach concedes, "the question might perhaps be raised
whether it would not be better to leave the Anatolian section alone
altogether and begin the Bagdad Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian
coast). "The future export trade in grain, wool, and cotton will in any
case do all it can to lengthen the cheap sea-passage and shorten
correspondingly the section on which it must pay railway freights. The
fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the Mediterranean coast in
the neighbourhood of Antioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most
promising trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all railway
projects."

It is worth remembering that a railway, following this route from the
Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by
the British Government. As e