Note 15 — Chapter VIII · GREAT BRITAIN BLOCKS THE WAY

Fraser, op. cit., pp. 42–43. The senior member of the firm of Lynch Brothers was H. F. B. Lynch (1862–1913), who was widely known as an authority on the Near East and who, as a Liberal member of Parliament, 1906–1910, was able to call official attention to the necessity for safeguarding British interests in Persia and Mesopotamia. That he succeeded in convincing the Government of the importance of his navigation concession is evidenced by the vigorous protests filed by the British Government with the Young Turks in 1909, when the latter attempted to operate competing vessels on the Tigris and the Shatt-el-Arab. On this point see Stenographische Berichte, XII Legislaturperiode, 2 Session, Volume 260 (1910), pp. 2174d et seq. Again in 1913–1914, the British Government refused to consider any settlement of the Bagdad Railway question which did not adequately protect the interests of the Lynch Brothers. Infra, pp. 258–265. Mr. Lynch, however, was not an irreconcilable opponent of the Deutsche Bank. He took the point of view that the Germans had rendered Turkey a great service by the construction of the Anatolian Railways because of the total lack of natural means of communication in the Anatolian plateau. He urged that they were making a great mistake, however, to extend the Anatolian system into Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates provided natural and logical avenues of trade for the Valley of the Two Rivers. In Mesopotamia, he maintained, what was needed was a development of the river traffic, not the construction of railways. Cf. H. F. B. Lynch, “The Bagdad Railway,” Fortnightly Review, March 1, 1911, pp. 384–386.