climate and in the condition in which they found themselves before the
canal works were carried out.... In such a land, so like a great part of
Mesopotamia, canals have introduced in a few years nearly a million of
inhabitants, and the resurrection of the country has been so rapid that
its very success was jeopardised by a railway not being able to be made
quickly enough to transport the enormous produce."
"A million of inhabitants"--that is the crux of the problem. Labour is
as necessary as water for the raising of crops; Sir William's barrages
and canals without hands to turn them to account would be a dead loss
instead of a profitable investment; but from what reservoir of
population is this man-power to be introduced? The German economists are
baffled by the difficulty.
"It is useless," as Rohrbach puts it, "to sink from 150 to 600 million
marks in restoring the canal system, and then let the land lie idle,
with all its new dams and channels, for lack of cultivators. Yet Turkey
can never raise enough settlers for Irak by internal colonisation[62]."
She cannot raise them even for the minor enterprises at Konia and
Adapa[63], and evidently the _Sawâd_ must draw its future cultivators
from somewhere beyond the bounds of Western Asia. From Germany, many
Germans have suggested; but German experts curtly dismiss the idea. The
first point Rohrbach makes in his book on the Bagdad Railway is that
German colonisation in Anatolia is impossible for political reasons. "No
worse service," he declares, "can be done to the German cause in the
East than the propagation of this idea," and the rise of Turkish
Nationalism has proved him right[64]. There remain the Arab lands;
"But even," he continues, "if the Turks thought of foreign colonisation
in Syria and Mesopotamia, to hold the Arabs in check" (the political
factor again), "that would be little help to us Germans, for only very
limited portions of those countries have a climate in which Germans can
work on the land or perform any kind of heavy manual labour."
And Germany herself is hard up for men.
"For all prospective developments in Turkey," writes Dr. Trietsch, "not
merely scientific knowledge, capital, and organisation are wanted, but
men, and Germany has no resources in men worth speaking of for opening
up the Islamic world."
It is one of his arguments for bringing in the Jews, but the
colonisation of Palestine will leave no Jews over for Irak. Rohrbach[65]
disposes of the Mouhadjirs--they are a drop in the bucket, and are no
more adapted to the climate than the Germans themselves. "There is
really nothing for it," he bursts out in despair, "but the introduction
of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of
Irak prevail."
That narrows the field to India and Egypt, and drives Turco-German
policy upon the horns of a dilemma:
"The colonists must either remain subjects of a foreign Power, a
solution which could not be considered for an instant by any Turkish
Government, or else they must become Turkish subjects--"
a condition which, to Indians and Egyptians, as well as Germans, would
be prohibitive. No one who has known good government would exchange it
for Ottoman government without the Capitulations as a guarantee.
The Ottoman Government has its own characteristic view. In a memorandum
on railways and reclamation, published by the Ministry of Public Works
in 1909, a _résumé_ is given of the Willcocks scheme.
"In due time," the memorandum proceeds, "a comprehensive scheme for the
whole of Mesopotamia must be carried out, but, apart from the question
of expense, it is clear that the public works involved will not be
justified until Turkey is in a position to colonise these extensive
districts, and this question cannot be considered till we have succeeded
in getting rid of the Capitulations."
This is the Ottoman pretension. Egypt, rid of the Osmanli, and India,
where he never ruled, have kept their ancient wealth of harvests and
population, and have man-power to spare for the reclamation of the
_Sawâd_. All the means are at hand for bringing the land to life--the
water, the engineer, the capital, the labour; only the Ottoman
pretension stands in the way, and condemns the _Sawâd_ to lie dead and
unharvested so long as it endures.
"The last voyage I made before coming to this country," wrote Sir
William Willcocks at Bagdad in 1911, "was up the Nile, from Khartûm to
the great equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidden region
I was filled with pride to think that I belonged to a race whose sons,
even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face
of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new
agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of
life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt if,
in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the
richest and most famous tract of the world, I had thought that I was a
scion of a race in whose hands God had placed, for hundreds of years,
the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give
no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty
rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine
months in the year, and desolating everything in their way for the
remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make"--she was then still
mistress of the _Sawâd_--"can be too great to roll away the reproach of
these parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven."
Turkey, which claims the present in Western Asia, is nothing but an
overthrow of the past and an obstruction of the future.
[Footnote 1: Tekin Alp: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal" (Weimar:
Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1915). The percentage is of course an exaggeration.]
[Footnote 2: In the sense of having preceded Arabic in this region, for
in itself, and in its original area, Arabic is as old a language an any
other variety of Semitic.]
[Footnote 3: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]
[Footnote 4: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]
[Footnote 5: _The Near East_, 30th March, 1917, p. 507; see also Tekin
Alp.]
[Footnote 6: The legendary ancestor of the Turkish race.]
[Footnote 7: _The Near East_, loc. cit.]
[Footnote 8: Which (for obvious reasons) was printed for private
circulation only.]
[Footnote 9: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916).]
[Footnote 10: Memorial of the German authority cited above.]
[Footnote 11: Quoted by the German authority cited above.]
[Footnote 12: The Vilayets of Basra and Bagdad.]
[Footnote 13: See the journal _Al-Mokattam_ of Cairo, 30th March, 31st
March, 1st April, 1916 (English translation in the form of a pamphlet:
"Syria during March, 1916," printed by Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd.,
1916).]
[Footnote 14: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 253.]
[Footnote 15: _Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey._]
[Footnote 16: Emir Hechmat, their chief, subsequently went to Hamadan in
Persia and organised guerilla bands there.]
[Footnote 17: _i.e._, the Turkish-speaking population in the Russian
Caucasus.]
[Footnote 18: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 80.]
[Footnote 19: And, like other Young Turks, a Jew ("Tekin Alp" being a
_nom de plume_).]
[Footnote 20: Moslem _religieux_.]
[Footnote 21: Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes:
Eindrucke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der Türkei, von Dr. Martin
Niepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, z.Zt.
Wernigerode. (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the Swiss
Committee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, "The
Horrors of Aleppo." London, 1917: Hodder and Stoughton.)]
[Footnote 22: The writer includes Armenia under this term.]
[Footnote 23: Dated 3rd Aug., 1915: See Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p.
548.]
[Footnote 24: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 413.]
[Footnote 25: "Die deutsch-türkeschen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen," by Dr.
Kurt Wiedenfeld, Professor of the Political Sciences at the University
of Halle. (Duncker and Humblot, 1915).]
[Footnote 26: "Die Bagdadbahn," by Dr. Paul Rohrbach (Berlin, 1911), pp.
43, 44.]
[Footnote 27: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 49, 50.]
[Footnote 28: The author rubs in his point in his concluding section:
"All economic measures we may take in Turkey are only a means to an end,
not an end in themselves" (p. 77).]
[Footnote 29: Wiedenfeld's monograph is a _sonderabdruck_ from the two
volumes of studies on the "Wirtschaftliche Annaherung zwischen dem
deutschen Reich u. seinen Verbundeten," edited by Heinrich Herkner and
published by the _Verein fur Sozialpolitik_, which preaches Naumann's
creed.]
[Footnote 30: Just as, by a more gradual process, the Magyar Oligarchy,
rather than the Hapsburg Dynasty, has become the instrument of German
control over Austria-Hungary.]
[Footnote 31: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 29, 33.]
[Footnote 32: Page 23.]
[Footnote 33: Except by a branch line from Adana to Alexandretta,
Rohrbach (pp. 27, 36, 37) laments the economic drawbacks of this
strategic necessity.]
[Footnote 34: "Bagdadbahn," p.60.]
[Footnote 35: The German memorialised.]
[Footnote 36: "Bagdadbahn," pp. 39, 40.]
[Footnote 37: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 530. Major Count Wolf von
Wolfskahl, who served as adjutant to Fakhri Pasha in the Turkish
"punitive expedition" against Urfa, is mentioned as particularly guilty
by a trustworthy neutral resident in Syria.]
[Footnote 38: On which Wiedenfeld lays stress, pp. 19, 22.]
[Footnote 39: "Leavening the Levant," by Rev. J. Greene, D.D. (Beston,
1916: The Pilgrim Press), p. 99.]
[Footnote 40: Excluding, of course, the hospital and educational
endowments, and the salaries of the missionaries themselves.]
[Footnote 41: _Hilal_, 4th April, 1916, quoted in Miscellaneous No. 31
(1916), pp. 654-6.]
[Footnote 42: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 309.]
[Footnote 43: Though the work of the American Presbyterian Mission at
Beirût must not be forgotten.]
[Footnote 44: See "Zionism and the Jewish Future" (London, 1916: John
Murray), pp. 138-170; for the agricultural machinery on the Jewish
National Fund's Model Farm at Ben-Shamen, see the Report of the German
Vice-Consul at Jaffa for the year 1912.]
[Footnote 45: "Die Jüden der Türkei" (Leipzig, 1915: Veit u. Comp.).
Pamphlet No. 8 of the _Deutsches Vorderasienscomitee's_ series: "Länder
u. Völker der Türkei."]
[Footnote 46: The Spanish-speaking Jews in Turkey are descended from
refugees to whom the Ottoman Government gave shelter in the sixteenth
century; the Arabic-speaking Jews have been introduced into Palestine
from the Yemen, by the Zionists, since 1908.]
[Footnote 47: Dr. Trietsch admits that Jewish colonisation in Palestine
was retarded because "the leading French and British Jews remained under
the impression of the Armenian massacres" (of 1895-7) "as presented by
the anti-Turkish, French and British Press.... In reality, the
butcheries of Armenians in Constantinople were a convincing proof that
the Jews in the Ottoman Empire were safe, for ... not a hair on a Jewish
head was touched." One wonders how he will exorcise the "impression" of
1915.]
[Footnote 48: As early as 1912 the German Vice-Consul at Jaffa betrayed
his annoyance at the progress which Zionism was making. He admits indeed
that "the falling off in trade last year would have been greater still
than it was, if the economic penetration of Palestine were not
reinforced by an idealistic factor in the shape of Zionism;" but he is
piqued at the "Jewish national vanity" which makes it advisable for
German firms to display their advertisements in Palestine in the Hebrew
language and character.]
[Footnote 49: Edessa from Thracian [Greek: _bedu_] = Slavonic _voda._]
[Footnote 50: _Muslin_ is named after Mosul, and cotton itself (in
Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Turkish) _bombyx_ or _bambuk_, after Bambyke
(Mumbij).]
[Footnote 51: "Bagdadbahn," p. 38.]
[Footnote 52: Book I., ch. 193.]
[Footnote 53: Cp. Sir William Willcocks. "The Irrigation of
Mesopotamia," p. 5 (London, 1911: Spon).]
[Footnote 54: Book I., ch. 192.]
[Footnote 55: Herodotus Book III., ch. 91.]
[Footnote 56: Book I., chs. 178-183.]
[Footnote 57: A hectare is approximately equal to two and a half acres.]
[Footnote 58: "The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate," by Guy le Strange
(Cambridge, 1905: at the University Press), pp. 25-9.]
[Footnote 59: "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," by Sir William Willcocks,
K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S. (London, 1911: Spon). The report is dated Bagdad,
March 26th, 1911.]
[Footnote 60: £1.00 Turkish = approximately £0.90 sterling.]
[Footnote 61: In his immediate project he intends to keep the Tigris
navigable, and allots £48,350 (Turkish) for its improvement.]
[Footnote 62: Cp. Wiedenfeld, pp. 62-4.]
[Footnote 63: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 57, 61.]
[Footnote 64: Cp. Wiedenfeld, p. 64.]
[Footnote 65: "Bagdadbahn," p. 83; cp. Trietsch, p. 11.]