THE KINGS OF THE EAST
The future of Mesopotamia with its enormous productive potentialities is a subject fraught with great interest to all those who have studied her past. Will this country again become one of the granaries of the world, and will it ever be, like Egypt, an important asset of our Empire? At first, when the war had freed the country from the Turkish yoke, it was assumed that it would rise into unheard-of prosperity under the fatherly care of British protection. Schemes of irrigation, long planned and to some small extent begun, even under the Turkish regime, were to re-stock Eden and benefit the whole world. The Baghdad railway would bring the wares of the East quickly to our doors, and it had even been anticipated that Nineveh would become as much a resort for European tourists as Rome.
All this, however, was foretold in the time when a new world was expected as soon as hostilities ceased. Another tune has been called now, and we find countless advocates of the policy to get out of Mesopotamia altogether and let well alone. Capitalization, like charity, we are told must begin at home, and thirty millions, estimated by the Inspector of Irrigation in Egypt, as necessary to turn Mesopotamia into a prosperous country with an annual revenue in fifty years time of ten millions a year, should be used for house building in England and not for empire building in Chaldea. On the other hand, wise men have told us that the Mesopotamian oilfields near Mosul are to be of great importance, like the Persian wells that have their pipe-line outfall at Abadan, and that a firm and fatherly hand is necessary to keep the country in a state of trade development. Should our sphere of influence be withdrawn from Mesopotamia things will revert back to chaos. Already trouble with the various tribes is brewing.
Not the least of the problems in controlling the marauding activities of some of the nomadic tribes is the difficulty of meting out adequate punishment to peace-breakers. The fact that all the stock-in-trade of a township amounts to a few pots and pans and house material of cane matting and mud makes it impossible to impress them by destroying their houses. In a few days everything would be rebuilt as before. It could often happen that the punitive expedition arrived to find the town moved to some district not mentioned in the orders for the day.
A BRITISH CRUISER IN THE PERSIAN GULF
Mesopotamia under the Turks was in some ways worse off than others of his badly governed possessions. The officials who were sent from Constantinople into various provinces regarded the job as a poor one, as far as the amenities of life were concerned, and one to be endured while making as big a pile as possible from the ground-down natives. I should imagine that one of these officials would be about as popular with the landowners as a publican was among the Jews.
An ancient prophecy foretells that the great river Euphrates shall be dried up that the way of the kings of the East shall be prepared. The time has come, if the war was indeed Armageddon. German engineers in 1914 had made a highway and effectively "dried up" the waters of the river for the passage of the armies. They themselves expected to be kings of the East although coming from the West, and some, it is interesting to note, explain the Prussians as of Oriental origin. At the same time the claims both of oil and empire kept us busy in the Persian Gulf. It looked as if we were to share this new kingdom or sphere of influence with Germany, until the war came and sorted things out.
There are some who see in vast irrigation schemes a "drying up" of the Euphrates that shall bring colonists from the Far East so that the denizens of China or Japan shall begin, like the Saxons in Kent, to get a footing in the country and become, in very substance, the Yellow Peril.
He is a rash man who would prophesy concerning the future of Mesopotamia as far as our empire is concerned. Perhaps before these pages are in print something decisive will have occurred. We read daily in our newspapers of rumours of war with restless tribes around Mosul, and of raids and skirmishes.
The land of Shinar, where Abraham dwelt, with its silent traces of the great civilizations which it fostered, Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Arabian, is once more, by the chances of war, an open book, and time alone will show what is to be written therein.
