GERMAN METHODS OF EXPANSION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 10 February 1908, Page 1

GERMAN METHODS OF EXPANSION.

The German banks, he points out, are the real inspirers of German economic and colonial expansion. The maxim of the German financier is that the bank ought to precede commerce in order to facilitate business transactions and organise credit. While German banks nave been multiplying in the East, Berlin, and Constantinople have been linked together by telegraph, and the Germans hope to extend telegraphic communications by tho Bagdad railway to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf and thence to the Dutch Indies. Sut Germany places even more reliance upon her maritime organisation, and, in addition to the conquest of the Mediterranean, her object is to found agencies in the Turkish ports, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. All these means, however, are but the avenues leading up to the construction of the Bagdad railway. Hitherto the great international routes have surrounded the Ottoman Empire without penetrat- i ing into its interior. The creation of a network of railways in Anatolia and the Bagdad railway concession has marked a veritable epocti in the economic history of the East. The resurrection of Asiatic Turkey is so gigantic an enterprise that it cannot be the achievement of one nation alone. M. Pinon strongly advocates an entente between Germany and France in the Levarft. The greater the 'task, he says, the more dangerous the possibility of disputes, the more need there is for ententes. There is room in the Ottoman Empire for everybody —even for the Turks.