Note 44 — Chapter VIII · GREAT BRITAIN BLOCKS THE WAY

H. H. Johnston, Common Sense in Foreign Policy (London, 1913), pp. v-vii. A similar opinion was expressed by Colonel A. C. Yate, at a meeting of the Central Asian Society, May 22, 1911. In answer to an alarmist paper on the Bagdad Railway which had been read to the society by André Chéradame, Colonel Yate made a spirited speech in which he warned his countrymen that M. Chéradame proposed that they should follow the same mistaken policy which had guided Lord Palmerston in resistance to the construction of the Suez Canal. “We cannot pick up every day,” he said, “a Lord Beaconsfield, who will repair the errors of his blundering predecessors.... Because the German Emperor and his instruments have adopted and put into practice the plans which Great Britain rejected [for a trans-Mesopotamian railway], we are now, forsooth, to pursue a policy which savours partly of ‘sour grapes’ and partly of ‘dog-in-the-manger,’ and which in either aspect will do nothing to strengthen British hands and promote British interests.” Proceedings of the Central Asian Society (London), May 22, 1911, p. 19.