. The land is immensely
fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has
left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life.
The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will
naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny
that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land
lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility,
yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its
sparse population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three
months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it
was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the
life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than
it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon
the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these
desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that
now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain
of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug canals, they made reservoirs, and
harnessed like some noble horse of the gods the torrents that now gallop
unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then
the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested
and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat
and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the
blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the
revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the
statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its
amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might
of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the canals still regulated
the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a
thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in
cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities
numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad
enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a
fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell
therein.'

But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not
diminished; the Turks could not disp