THE BAGDAD RAILWAY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10767, 16 May 1911, Page 2

THE BAGDAD RAILWAY.

AND A GERMAN POUT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. (By G. Ward Price.) The Bagdad railway is a great game to watch. Like a chess match between two masters, it admittedly develops a little slowly, and occasionally, too. a veil is drawn over the board and several moves are hidden. But with a little imagination it is not hard to follow •the progress of the play and to get a good idea of all the developments and checks, the calculated bluff, and the adroit concession with which Germany is working determinedly, ambitiously, unrestingly in Mesopotamia to get another market for her hungry industries and another bulwark for her influence in world-policy. ■ They are great men, too, who move the pieces. JBaron Marschall von Bieberstein is' not merely a professional diplomat. He is just what everyone who knows him says of him: "Baron Marschall is a great man." There are two theories in Constantinople as to why he is not Chancellor of the German Empire. One is that the Kaiser has no one good enough to replace him here in his important work of building up Germany's ever-growing commercial and political influence in Turkey. The other is that Emperor William does not wish to meet another Bismarck in these latter days in the form of the able and masterful Baron Marschall, and for a man to be feared by the Kaiser is no faint testimony to his strength of mind and will. A tall, heavily-built man, with a great, large-featured, haughty face and a mane of rather long white hair. He is the commanding officer of Germany's Near Eastern campaign of cqmmercial expansion. ' Hia is the brain that is behind the Bagdad railway. Quite another type is M. Edouard Huguenin, Director-General of the Bagdad Railway Company. He is the dynamo that drives it. If Baron Marschall inspires, . M. Huguenin works. In grip of detail, in resource and enterprise, in energy and driving power, no one connected with the enterprise excels him.

M. Huguenin is a Swiss. He is a portly, red-faced, grey-bearded man. Whereas Baron Marschall is dignified and imposing, M. Huguenin is quick and dominating and emphaticythe man of affairs. He has a big voice ■ and a brusque manner. That is in business. In his private life I imagine he is one of those men whoso laugh is worth going a good way to hear. As for his working powers, he asked me once to see. him at 8 a.m., and seemed then to be a long way into his business day. These are the two outstanding figures of the Bagdad railway contest. They loom above the other players round the board, and if they were not there the game would not be the centre of .European attention to-day. With the new Convention that has just boon signed the Bagdad Railway enters upon another stage of its long and troubled history. It takes on a new aspect. It would be foolish, however, to talk as though all difficulties had been magically charmed from its path and that all that now remained was to carry out the concluded arrangements. amid a gush of international benevolence.

In the Osmanischer Lloyd, the Constantinople journal that is the local voice of German sentiment, one reads how the Bagdad Railway Company, in i enouncing its rights of construction lievond Bagdad to another organisation. in which it will probably continue to, pxert considerable influence, has demonstrated once for all the fact that, as a German undertaking, it recognises its duty to assist Young Turkey in her economic development and to identify its own interest with the promotion of the prosperity and welfare of the Ottoman Empire. Germany and her railway company, one gathers, have displayed much pious vritue in this affair.' To appease the unfounded and uncharitable suspicions . of Great Britain, to release Young Turkey from inconvenient bond, and generally to promote international peace and harmony, the German promoters of this scheme have cheerfully surrendered valuable rights on the very lowest terms as indemnity.

All this, of course, is conventional bluff. The.Bagdad railway people are business men. and business men do not surrender valuable advantages if they have auy chance of keeping them. The influence that reduced the Bagdad Railway Company to an accommodating frame of mind as regards the Persian Gulf end of the line was money-hunger. The Bagdad railway wants capital, and was beginning to find it hard to place its stock. Germany needs a great deal of her own money for home enterprises, and she would like to see a little English capital turn away from Canada and South America to help the Bagdad railway across the desert. Hence a little readiness to make a partial concession about the control of the section of the railway beyond Bagdad. Of course Germany has not done so badly in the bargain. Alexandretta is a good exchange for Bussorah, and such i strong entrenchments of British opposi- J tion were rising around Koweit that her renunciation of that port was more graceful than voluntary. Indeed, from tlio standpoint of British strategic interests, it might be doubted whether a Germanised Alexandretta has not the same dangers as a Germanised Koweit. Koweit was to hecome a German port at the gates of India. Alexandretta stands before those of Egj'pt. Moreover, Alexandretta is not bottled up in a corner of the Persian Gulf. It is a good natural harbor on the Mediterranean. It would be a possible base for military operations against Cyprus. A German harbor at Alexandretta in the coming days of eight Triplo Alliance Dreadnoughts in the Mediterranean will have a distinct bearing on British communications with the East. These are considerations which may be deemed remote, but they enter into a full appreciation of the question. The two possibilities of difficulty that now loom largest on the horizon of the Bagdad railway are: (1) The arrangement of the shares of capital and representation which England and France are to have in the Bagdad Gulf section relatively to those of, Germany aud Turkey; and (2) the fixing of the amount of the indemnity which the new company for the Bagdad Gulf section is to pay to the original' Bagdad Railway Company in respect of that company's proportional loss on kilometric guarantees, due to the fact that the sections of which she retains the construction are more costly than those which she lias renounced. As to the former question, it is obvious that if the liew scheme of inter-

national construction is not going to be a running sore of international discontent and trouble, then England and France must be able to outweigh, or at the very least to counterpoise, the solid block or Turco-German interest in the undertaking. The arrangement of the indemnity will most probably be a troublesome business. It appears likely to be complicated by the consideration that the tost of constructional labor for the line and other important conditions have materially changed since the kilometric guarantees were fixed. But one of the most important con-.

siderations suggested by the new appearance which the Bagdad railway scheme takes on is that the commercial axis of the railway is to some extent changed. Its importance as a line from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf is equalled by its new value as a direct route from the shores of the Meditteranean to Persia, via Alexandretta, Osmanieli, Sadijeh, and Khanikin. German calicoes shipped in subsidised German tramp steamers from Hamburg to Alexandretta v , and forwarded by rail from there to Persia, will start under very favorable conditions as against English goods shipped from Manchester through the Suez Canal, with its heavy dues, to the head of the Persian Gulf and thence by river and caravan to the same market. Our tenfold superiority in Persian trade will not rest on too sure a basis when that little forty miles of railway comes creeping down to link up the Bagdad railway with the shores of the Mediterranean.