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