ms equally clear that the proper
sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards
from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each
other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very
well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India,
and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost,
by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of
world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should
never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no
means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated
here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen,
England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in
a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still
might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a
huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany,
in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged
screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of
Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much
as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of
realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her
pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right--she usually is right in
these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical--for she seems
dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was
the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she
guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work
and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we
may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris
and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as
Dr. Rohrbach points out in his _Bagdadbahn_, needs only the guarantee of
security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the
hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under
a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of
property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread
and something of the ancient prosperity return