Слике страница
PDF
ePub

Baron v. Vietinghoff-Scheel, at a meeting of the Pan-German League in Erfurt, in September, 1912, said:

Our frontiers are too narrow. We must become land hungry, must acquire new regions for settlement; otherwise we will be a sinking people, a stranded race. True love for our people and its children commands us to think of their future, however much they may accuse us of quarrelsomeness and lust of war.

Paul de Lagarde, in 1913, in his German writings, said:

We must create a Central Europe which will guarantee the peace of the entire continent from the moment when it shall have driven the Russians from the Black Sea and the Slavs from the south, and shall have conquered large tracts to the east of our frontiers for German colonization.

Klaus Wagner, in his War, in 1906 writes:

Every great people needs new territory. It must expand over foreign soil; it must expel the foreigners by the power of the sword.

In 1906, Ernst Hasse, in his World Politics, Imperialism, and Colonial Politics, said:

The territory open to future German expansion must extend from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, absorbing the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Switzerland, the whole basin of the Danube, the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor.

Amicus Patriae, Armenien und Kreta, eine Lebensfrage für Deutschland, 1896:

In this nineteenth century, when Germany has become the first power in the world, are we incapable of doing what our ancestors did? Germany must lay her mighty grasp upon Asia Minor. The Turk has lost his rights, not only from the moral but also from the strictly legal point of view. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 he gave undertakings, not one of which he has kept. His claims are nullified.

F. List, Sammtliche Schriften, 1850:

The right and left banks of the Danube from Presburg to its mouth, the northern provinces of Turkey, and the west coast of the Black Sea-do they not offer large tracts of land, naturally fertile and as yet unexploited, to the German emigrants?

Friedrich Naumann,"Asia, 1899:

All weakening of German national energy by pacifist associations or analogous activities reinforces the formidably increasing power of those who rule today from Cape to Cairo, from Ceylon to the Polar Sea. No truce with England. Let our policy be a national policy. This must be the mainspring of our action in the Eastern question. This is the fundamental reason which necessitates our political indifference to the suffering of Christians in the Turkish Empire, painful as these must be to our private feelings. The truth here, as elsewhere, is that we must find out which is the greatest and morally the most important task. When the choice has been made there must be no tergiversation. William II has made his choice; he is the friend of the Padisha, because he believes in a greater Germany.

These quotations are sufficient to show the trend of thinking of German political, military and historical writers, as well as writers on economics. The eyes of Germany were turned toward the Balkan Peninsula and Ottoman Empire not only as providing a field into which excess German population could flow but as affording a basis for the increase of political and military power to Germany.

THE RESOURCES OF TURKEY

We of the West have been accustomed to think of Turkey as almost a barren and desolate waste, and so have not realized that within the bounds of Asiatic Turkey there was much to attract the colonizer and the European nation who would conquer for the sake of exploitation. There is no country of its size lying so near the centers of European civilization possessing, as does Turkey, untold, undeveloped resources. These resources have not only not been developed under the 500 years of Mohammedan rule but their very existence has not been discovered and published to the world except in small part. The policy of Turkey was to exclude the entrance of foreign capital for the development of internal resources, while the government that claimed ownership of all mineral products was not capable of developing these resources. The writer has known of silver and copper mines in the interior of Turkey, operated by the Turkish government, that not only produced no returns to the operating government, but were a constant liability, the product of the mines not meeting

the expense of production. One of the outstanding reasons for this, beyond the natural propensity of the Turkish official to graft, was the absence of transportation facilities. When lead and silver and copper must needs be transported hundreds of miles upon the backs of camels over foot-worn paths, through mountains and plains crossed by swollen streams at certain periods of the year, it is not difficult to conceive that the cost of production might easily exceed the value of the product. In the interior of Turkey there are apparently unlimited deposits of valuable minerals. It is widely known that there are mountains of high-grade copper ore which have hardly been drawn upon up to the present time. The writer has heard natives of the country speak of copper mines in the Vilayet of Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Diarbekir where the ore was of such pure quality that it was impossible for the natives with their black powder to break it up for transportation. With the best method of tamping known to them, the drill hole into which their black powder was inserted and tamped, instead of producing a shattering of the ore, fired the charge like a rifle. Copper of this purity the natives were unable to do anything with, but it awaits development under modern methods of mining.

The country is also blessed with many water powers of large value which might be utilized for all kinds of manufacturing purposes as well as for irrigation. Asiatic Turkey is by no means a desert but offers rich returns to the government that will develop the resources that lie upon the surface as well as those that are more concealed.

The climate is varied and suited to a great variety of grain and fruit products. By the introduction of commercial fertilizers and modern methods of agriculture, the agricultural products of the country which have been for generations sufficient to supply the needs of a fairly large population might be quadrupled in quantity and quality. German explorers have crossed the country during the last fifteen years in many directions and have taken careful note of their widely extended observations, and thus the leaders in Germany were aware of the rich resources of that country, which would not only provide for a surplus

population but which might be made to furnish an adequate base for military operations in the future.

What is true of the Ottoman Empire east of the Bosphorus is true in a large measure of the Balkan Peninsula extending from the Adriatic Sea across to the Black Sea. There is large mineral wealth in that country now undeveloped, with water power and other resources available for the uses of any stable, enterprising government that can be established. While the expansion of Germany to the northwest would give her an outlet to the North Sea, which she has so long desired, with the dense population of the Netherlands and of Belgium they would not afford the field for colonization of which Germany so greatly felt the need. But the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire offer every facility for an extensive colonization and are full also of promise of large commercial and industrial expansion and of a great increase in military power.

THE BAGDAD RAILWAY

The railway line connecting Berlin with Constantinople was open to traffic in 1888. The road was constructed by Baron Hirsch through the Balkan Peninsula and was a part of a plan, apparently then in process of development, to provide an overland route with direct railroad connection from the capital of Germany not only to Bagdad but to some point on the Persian Gulf below Bagdad, giving Germany the advantage over England in a short route to India. The only break in the all-rail route was at Constantinople, in crossing the Bosphorus, and the tunneling or bridging of this historic piece of water is not by any means an impossible engineering feat.

In 1888, when the all-rail route to Constantinople was completed there were only short railway lines anywhere within the Turkish Empire eastward and these were mostly in the hands of Germany, with kilometric guarantees from the Ottoman Government. Little by little the Germans obtained from the Turkish government concessions to construct a railway toward the southeast from Constantinople.

In 1893 they were granted such a concession from Eskishehir to Konia. This line was open to traffic in 1896.

There is no need of following out in detail the development of the Bagdad Railway, which was under construction throughout its lower length by German engineers at the outbreak of the war. This construction has been pushed until at the present time, so far as can be ascertained, there is direct railway connection between Constantinople and Nisibin, nearly 100 miles to the east of Oorfa. This line has afforded the only means of supplying the two Ottoman armies operating on the Palestine and the Mesopotamian fronts. The acquisition and construction of this railway by the Germans is another indication of Germany's purpose to occupy at least the southern section of Europe and to control a direct line of communication from Berlin to Constantinople and the Persian Gulf. Branch lines have been surveyed reaching into the productive regions north of this main line, but none of these lines are constructed up to the present time. It is reported that there were less than 150 miles of this line to be completed to make an unbroken connection from Constantinople to Bagdad. That section of the Bagdad Railway that was started from Bagdad is now of course in the hands of the Allies; the remaining section is still in the hands of the Turkish forces.

Little attention was given in the Western world to the concessions secured by Germany for this railway, and it seems to have aroused little suspicion in the minds of the European government that Germany was carrying out a deep-laid plan to gain control over the heart of Asiatic Turkey. This point became more apparent through the developments of the war, showing how completely Germany had mastered the situation from the beginning and made preparation for the military use of all this part of Turkey in case of a European outbreak. Had there been no war in Europe, Germany would have gone on quietly completing her plans, finishing the railway, and so making herself practically impregnable in Turkey. From the outbreak of the war until the present time she has been doing

« ПретходнаНастави »