86 A Short History of the Middle East
tolerance—a noble task, worthy of the great renown of France.'
In 1863 the Ottoman Bank was founded with the controlling
interest in French hands, British interests being secondary; it had
the monopoly of the banknote-issue and branches in every im-
portant town in the Empire. In 1867 the French government in-
vited the Sultan to visit Paris, and recommended to him a system
of secular public education and the undertaking of great public
works and communications. As a contribution to the first, there
was opened in 1868 under the joint direction of the Turkish
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Ambassador the Lycee
of Galata-Serai, a great secondary school open to Ottoman sub-
jects of every race and creed, where more than six hundred boys
were taught by Europeans in the French language—'a symbol of
the action of France, exerting herself to teach the peoples of the
Orient in her own language the elements of Western civilization'.
In the same year a company consisting mainly of French capitalists
received a concession for railways to connect Istanbul and Salonica
with the existing railways on the Middle Danube.1
But all these schemes for establishing a French cultural and
financial dominion in the Middle East were 'brutally interrupted'
by the disaster of the Franco-German War of 1870. France
emerged from the War permanently weakened, and her imperial
energies were now focused in the main on her expanding colonies
in N.W. Africa. Not that she has ever renounced her aspirations
in the Middle East; but after 1870 her relation to Britain in this
region was that of an envious, and sometimes spiteful, loser in a
race, rather than that of a serious rival. She could for twenty years
obstruct the efforts of Lord Cromer to restore the financial stability
and promote the economic progress of Egypt;2 in the 'nineties she
could intrigue against Britain at Muscat, or seek to forestall her in
establishing a position 011 the Upper Nile,3 but whereas from
1815 to 1870 British imperial interests in the Middle East had been
thought to be challenged by France and Russia to a roughly equal
degree, from 1870 to 1900 there is no doubt that the Russian chal-
lenge, real or imagined, easily assumed the first place.
* * *
Palmerston's fears of a Franco-Russian coalition against Britain
1 Driault, op. cit., 187E.
2 Lord Milner, England in Egypt, ch. XIII.
s Temperley and Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy, 501 fF.