Some years ago I was astonished to learn in Europe that American banking interests, and American contracting and engineering firms in alliance therewith, had their eyes upon Asia Minor and the possibility of its development by American railroad enterprise. I was astonished to learn that some people at Constantinople had authority for the use of the name of J. P. Morgan & Co. Indeed, a railroad concession in Asia Minor, the details of which it is not now necessary to go into, had been arranged, I was told, and lacked only signatures. The American people felt that the Germans were the little devils under the table who stayed the hand of the Sultan, and kept his pen off the parchment. Never would the signature come down on that paper, although declared to have been many times promised.
The English were, of course, vitally interested in any railroad concessions in Asia Minor as opening the route to the Persian Gulf and India. Money talks with Turkey as nowhere else. The Germans had made a great impression upon the Bosphorus. Nobody at that point in the geography of the world could fail to see the wonderful commercial progress of the Germans and the military power that stood behind ready to back it up.
A concession for a railroad from the Bosphorus to Bagdad and through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf finally went to Germany, and the signature of the Sultan was at the bottom of the paper. There was, of course, the usual Oriental compromise, and the concession for the oil fields of Mesopotamia went to the English; but the signature of the Sultan is still lacking to that piece of paper.
English statesmen announced that the Bagdad railroad was a purely private enterprise, financed in Germany by people associated with the Deutsche Bank. They had later to confess that error. Germany laughed and later openly announced that the Bagdad railroad was a Prussian enterprise of state. In fact, this concession, which is likely to be famous in history when the Allies win, was handed over to the German Emperor personally by the Sultan.
Already a thousand miles of this road have been constructed through Asia Minor to Mosul. The concession carries the mineral rights for ten miles on either side of the railroad, except through the oil fields of Mesopotamia, said to be among the greatest of the oil fields of the world. They are really part of the famous Russian oil territory between Batum and Baku, or the Black and Caspian seas, which extends not only south into Mesopotamia but is now being developed far to the north in the Ural Mountains of Great Russia.