"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.]