d, it has been the battleground of brigand tribes--Kurds from the
hills and Arabs from the desert, skirmishing or herding their flocks,
making or breaking alliance, but always robbing any tiller of the land
of the fruits of his labour.

"If once," Dr. Rohrbach prophesies, "the peasant population were sure of
its life and property, it would joyfully expand, push out into the
desert, and bring new land under the plough; in a few years the villages
would spring up, not by dozens, but by hundreds."

At present cultivation is confined to the Armenian foot-hills--an
uncertain arc of green from Aleppo to Mosul. But the railway strikes
boldly into the deserted middle of the land, giving the arc a chord, and
when Turco-German strategic interests no longer debar it from being
linked up, through Aleppo, with a Syrian port, it will be the really
valuable section of the Bagdad system. The railway is the only capital
enterprise that Northern Mesopotamia requires, for there is rain
sufficient for the crops without artificial irrigation. Reservoirs of
population are the need. The Kurds who come for winter pasture may be
induced to stay--already they have been settling down in the western
districts, and have gained a reputation for industry; the Bedawin, more
fickle husbandmen, may settle southward along the Euphrates, and in time
there will be a surplus of peasantry from Armenia and Syria. These will
add field to field, but unless some stronger stream of immigration is
led into the land, it will take many generations to recover its ancient
prosperity; for in the ninth century A.D. Northern Mesopotamia paid
Harun-al-Rashid as great a revenue as Egypt, and its cotton commanded
the market of the world[50].

Southern Mesopotamia--the Irak of the Arabs and Babylonia of the
Greeks--lies desolate like the North, but is a contrast to it in every
other respect. Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach
grudgingly admits[51] that down the Tigris to Basra, and not upstream to
Alexandretta, is the natural channel for its trade. It gets nothing from
the Mediterranean, neither trade nor rain, and every drop of water for
cultivation must be led out of the rivers; but the rivers in their
natural state are worse than the drought. Their discharge is extremely
variable--about eight times as great in April as in October; they are
always silting up their beds and scooping out others; and when there are
no men to interfere they leave half the c