As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself admits that
"The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway cannot be described as properly paying its way. It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Anatolian Railway with the older railway system in the West…. The parts of Asia Minor which were thickly populated and prosperous in antiquity lie mostly westward of this first section of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys and" (French and English) "railways leading down to the Aegean."
"There are other once-flourishing parts of the peninsula," he continues, "which the Bagdad Railway does not touch at all"—the Vilayet of Sivas and the other Armenian provinces. The original German plan was to carry the Railway through Armenia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not unnaturally vetoed the construction, so near her Caucasian frontiers, of a line which, by the nature of the Turco-German understanding, must primarily serve strategic ends[31], and the track was therefore deflected to the south-east. This took it through the most barren parts of Central Anatolia, and in the next section involved the slow and costly work of tunnelling the Taurus and Amanus mountains.
"If merely economic and not political advantages were taken into account," Dr. Rohrbach concedes, "the question might perhaps be raised whether it would not be better to leave the Anatolian section alone altogether and begin the Bagdad Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian coast). "The future export trade in grain, wool, and cotton will in any case do all it can to lengthen the cheap sea-passage and shorten correspondingly the section on which it must pay railway freights. The fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the Mediterranean coast in the neighbourhood of Antioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most promising trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all railway projects."
It is worth remembering that a railway, following this route from the Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by the British Government. As early as the thirties of last century Colonel Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, and in 1867 the proposal was considered by a Committee of the House of Commons. For the economic development of Western Asia it is clearly a better plan, but then Dr. Rohrbach bases the "necessity for the East Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway" on wholly different grounds.
"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Turkey's military interests, which obviously would be very poorly served" (by German railway enterprise) "if troops could not be transported by train without a break from Bagdad and Mosul to the extremity of Anatolia, andvice versâ."
The Bagdad Railway is thus acknowledged to be an instrument of strategy for the Germans and for the Turks of domination—for "vice versâ" means that Turkish troops can be transported at a moment's notice through the tunnels from Anatolia to enforce the Ottoman pretension over the Arab lands. Militarily, these tunnels are the most valuable section of the line; economically, they are the most costly and unremunerative. And the second (and longer) tunnel could still have been dispensed with, if, south of Taurus, the track had been led along the Syrian coast. "Economic interests and considerations of expense," Wiedenfeld concedes[32], "argued strongly for the latter course, but—fortunately, as we must admit to-day—the military point of view prevailed." Thus the Turco-German understanding prevented the Bagdad Railway first from beginning at a port on the Mediterranean coast, and then from touching the coast at all[33]. "The spine of Turkey," as German writers are fond of calling it, distorts the natural articulation of Western Asia.
Nemesis has overtaken the Germans in the Armenian deportations—a "political end" of Turkish Nationalism which swept away the "economic means" towards Germany's subtler policy. A month or two before the outbreak of war Dr. Rohrbach stated, in a public lecture, that
"Germany has an important interest in effecting and maintaining contact with the Armenian nation. We have set before ourselves the necessary and legitimate aim of spreading and enrooting German influence in Turkey, not only by military missions and the construction of railways, but also by the establishment of intellectual relations, by the work of GermanKultur—in a word, by moral conquests; and we are determined, by pacific means, to reach an amicable understanding with the Turks and the other nations in the Turkish Empire. Our ulterior object in this is to strengthen the Turkish Empire internally with the aid of German science, education, and training, and for this work the Armenians are indispensable."
A few months later Germany, as part price of Turkey's intervention in the War, had to leave the Young Turks a "free hand" to exterminate the nation which was the indispensable instrument of her Turkish policy. On the 9th August, 1915, the German Ambassador at Constantinople handed in a formal protest against the deportations, in which his Government "declined all responsibility for the consequences which might result." On the 11th January, 1916, in the German Reichstag, the Chief of the Political Department of the Foreign Office replied to a question from Dr. Liebknecht that "an exchange of views about the reaction of these measures upon the population was taking place," and that "further information could not be given." And while Germany was maintaining this "correct attitude" before the world, she was assisting in Turkey at the destruction of her own work.
Even the atrocities of 1909 had damaged the economic prospects of theAdapa district from which Dr. Rohrbach[34] hoped so much, for
"The first thing the Turkish peasants did was to destroy all the steam-ploughs and nearly all the threshing machines (there were over a hundred of them) which the Armenian villagers had imported for the cultivation of the Civilian plain[35]."
By the atrocities of 1915 the economic life of Western Asia was completely ruined, and the fruits of German enterprise were swept away in the flood.
"I have before me," writes our German memorialised, "a list of the customers of a single Constantinople firm of importers which places its orders principally in Germany and Austria. The accounts which this firm has outstanding amount to date to £13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378 customers in 42 towns of the interior. In consequence of the Armenian deportations these debts are no longer recoverable. The 378 customers, with all their employees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the face of the earth. Any of the owners that are still alive are now beggars on the borders of the Arabian desert."
At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthropists of all nations had founded orphanages and started native industries. Attached to the German orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing vats and a spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation, describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the national as from the humanitarian point of view."
"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400 persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway, where German interests are predominant."
He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good—but in 1911 Dr. Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.
"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes, "Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the Armenian deportations."
Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was massacred in 1915—the third time in twenty years, and this time to extinction—and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish guns were served by German artillerymen[37].
"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians."
This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians will be on Germany's head:
"'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, … and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians…. Others say: 'Perhaps the German Government has its hands tied by certain agreements defining its powers, or perhaps it is not an opportune moment for intervention.'
"Our presence had no ameliorating effect, and what we could do ourselves was negligible…. The abusive epithet 'Giaur' is heard once more by German ears….
"We think it our duty to draw attention to the fact that our educational work in Turkey forfeits its moral basis and the natives' esteem, if the German Government is not in a position to prevent the brutalities inflicted here upon the wives and children of murdered Armenians.
"The writer considers it out of the question that the German Government, if it seriously desired to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh hour, would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason….
"If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our GermanKulturpolitik. We must stop sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about German poets and philosophers, German culture and German ideals, to say nothing of German Christianity.
"Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign Office as higher-grade teacher to the German Technical School at Aleppo. The Prussian Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined upon me, when I went out, to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me in the grant of furlough to take up this post. I should not be fulfilling my duty as a German official and an accredited representative of German culture, if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils entrusted to my charge were driven out into the desert to die of starvation.
"The things of which everybody here has been a witness for months past remain as a stain on Germany's shield in the minds of Oriental nations."
What will be left to Germany in Western Asia after the war? She may keep her trade, though Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of commodities between Germany and Turkey has never attained any really considerable dimensions," and that "the German export trade commands no really staple article whatever of the kind exported by England, Austria, and Russia"—unless we count as such munitions and other materials of war[38]. Except for the last item, this German trade will probably remain and grow; but the German hegemony, based on railway enterprise and reinsured by "moral conquests," will scarcely survive the Ottoman dominion.
Happily there are other representatives of culture, other indigenous nationalities, other possibilities of economic development, which will remain in Western Asia when the Turk and German have gone, and which may be equal to repairing the ruin they will leave behind.
For nearly a century now the American Evangelical Missions have been doing work there which is the greatest conceivable contrast to the GermanKulturpolitikof the last thirty years. A missionary, sent out to relieve the first pioneers, was given the following instructions by the American Board:
"The object of our missions to the Oriental Churches is, first, to revive the knowledge and spirit of the Gospel among them, and, secondly, by this means to operate upon the Mohammedans.
"The Oriental Churches need assistance from their brethren abroad. Our object is not to subvert them: you are not sent among those Churches to proselytise. Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if he will, the Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental.
"Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and duties of theGospel[39]."
In this spirit the American missionaries have worked. They have had no warships behind them, no diplomatic support, no political ambitions, no economic concessions. As Evangelicals their first step was to translate the Bible into all the living languages and current scripts of the Nearer East. For the Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of their modern literature, but the jealousy of the Orthodox and Gregorian clergy was naturally aroused. Native Protestant Churches formed themselves—not by the missionaries' initiative but on their own. They were trained by the missionaries to self-government, and as they spread from centre to centre they grouped themselves in unions, with annual meetings to settle their common affairs. The missionaries also encouraged them to be self-supporting, and in 1908 the contributions of the Native Churches to the general expenses of the missions were twice as large as those of the American Board[40]. The Ottoman Government recognised its Protestant subjects as a religious corporation(Millet)in 1853, and in spite of this the jealousy of the national Churches was overcome. For the work of the Americans was not confined to the new Protestant community. The translation of the Bible led them also into educational work; they laid the foundations of secondary education in Western Asia, and their schools and colleges—still the only institutions of their kind—are attended by Gregorians as well as Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, Moslem girls as well as boys. As they opened up remoter districts they added medicine to their activities, and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the first in the field. And all this has been built up so unassumingly that its magnitude is hardly realised by the Americans themselves. In the three Turkey Missions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia—the whole of Turkey except the Arab lands—there were, on the eve of the War, 209 American missionaries with 1,299 native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with 15,348 members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constantinople College and 6 other colleges or high schools for girls; Robert College on the Bosphorus and 9 other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals.
The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away everything. The Protestant Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were deported and massacred like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and girls were carried away from the American colleges, the nurses and patients from the hospitals; the empty buildings were "requisitioned" by the Ottoman authorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted efforts to save a remnant from destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves that the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a lecture by a member of the GermanReichstag, who had declared himself "opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a Constantinople newspaper[41] wrote:
"The suppression of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical missions or by individuals belonging to enemy nations is as important a measure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks to their schools, foreigners were able to exercise great moral influence over the young men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of its spiritual and intellectual guidance. By closing them the Government has put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous."
But the missionaries' spirit was something they could not destroy.
"When they deported the Armenians," wrote a missionary, "and left us without work and without friends, we decided to come home and get our vacation and be ready to go wherever we could after the War[42]."
After the War the Turks in Anatolia may still be infatuated enough to banish their best friends, but in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the Americans will find more than their former field; for, in one form or another, Armenia is certain to rise again. The Turks have not succeeded in exterminating the Armenian nation. Half of it lives in Russia, and its colonies are scattered over the world from California to Singapore. Even within the Ottoman frontiers the extermination is not complete, and the Arabian deserts will yield up their living as well as the memory of their dead. The relations of Armenia with the Russian democracy should not be more difficult to settle than those of Finland and Poland; her frontiers cannot be forecast, but they must include the Six Vilayets—so often promised reforms by the Concert of Europe and so often abandoned to the revenges of the Ottoman Government—as well as the Civilian highlands and some outlet to the sea. One thing is certain, that, whatever land is restored to them, the Armenians will turn its resources to good account, for, while their town-dwellers are the merchants and artisans of Western Asia, 80 per cent., of them are tillers of the soil.
What the Americans have done for Armenia has been done for Syria by the French[43]. There are half a million Maronite Catholics in Syria, and since the seventeenth century France has been the protectress of Catholicism in the Near East. In 1864, when there was trouble in Syria and the Maronites were being molested by the Ottoman Government, France landed an army corps and secured autonomy for the Lebanon under a Christian governor. But French influence is not limited to the Lebanon province. All over Syria there are French clerical, secular, and Judaic schools. Beirût and Damascus, Christian and Moslem—for there is more religious tolerance in Syria than in most Near Eastern countries—are equally under the spell of French civilisation; and France is the chief economic power in the land, for French enterprise has built the Syrian railways. The sufferings of Syria during the War have been described; the Young Turks have confiscated the railways and deprived the Lebanon of its autonomy; even Rohrbach deprecates the fact that "only a few of the higher officials in Syria are chosen from among the natives of the country, while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are sent out from Constantinople," and he attributes to this policy "the feeling against the Turks, which is most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's periphrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master in its own house when the Turk has been removed. The future status and boundaries of Syria can no more be forecast than those of Armenia at the present stage of the War; yet here, too, certain tendencies are clear. In some form or other Arab Syria will retain her connection with France, and her growing population will no longer be driven by misgovernment to emigration.
Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for the last quarter of a century, and during the same period the Jews, whose birthright in Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their native land—not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of their last civil rights,pogromsof life itself; they came to Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.
The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.
Each colony is now governed by an elective council of inhabitants, with committees for education, police, and the arbitration of disputes, and they have organised co-operative unions which make them independent of middlemen in the disposal of their produce. Their production has rapidly risen in quantity and value, through the industry and intelligence of the average Jewish settler, assisted latterly by an Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit, near Haifa, which improves the varieties of indigenous crops and acclimatises others[44]. There is a "Palestine Land Development Company" which buys land in big estates and resells it in small lots to individual settlers, and an "Anglo-Palestine Bank" which makes advances to the new settlers when they take up their holdings. As a result of this enlightened policy the number of colonies has risen to about forty, with 15,000 inhabitants in all and 110,000 acres of land, and these figures do not do full justice to the importance of the colonising movement. The 15,000 Jewish agriculturists are only 12-1/2 per cent. of the Jewish population in Palestine, and 2 per cent., of the total population of the country; but they are the most active, intelligent element, and the only element which is rapidly increasing. Again, the land they own is only 2 per cent. of the total area of Palestine; but it is between 8 and 14 per cent. of the area under cultivation, and there are vast uncultivated tracts which the Jews can and will reclaim, as their numbers grow—both by further colonisation and by natural increase, for the first generation of colonists have already proved their ability to multiply in the Promised Land. Under this new Jewish husbandry Palestine has begun to recover its ancient prosperity. The Jews have sunk artesian wells, built dams for water storage, fought down malaria by drainage and eucalyptus planting, and laid out many miles of roads. In 1890 an acre of irrigable land at Petach-Tikweh, the earliest colony, was worth £3 12s., in 1914, £36, and the annual trade of Jaffa rose from £760,000 to £2,080,000 between 1904 and 1912. "The impetus to agriculture is benefiting the whole economic life of the country," wrote the German Vice-Counsul at Jaffa in his report for 1912, and there is no fear that, as immigration increases, the Arab element will be crowded to the wall. There are still only two Jewish colonies beyond Jordan, where the Hauran—under the Roman Empire a corn-land with a dozen cities—has been opened up by the railway and is waiting again for the plough.
But will immigration continue now that the Jew of the Pale has been turned at a stroke into the free citizen of a democratic country? Probably it will actually increase, for the Pale has been ravaged as well as liberated during the war, and the Jews of Germany have based an ingenious policy on this prospect, which is expounded thus by Dr. Davis-Trietsch of Berlin[45]:
"According to the most recent statistics about 12,900,000 out of the 14,300,000 Jews in the world speak German or Yiddish (jüdisch-deutsch) as their mother-tongue…. But its language, cultural orientation, and business relations the Jewish element from Eastern Europe" (the Pale) "is an asset to German influence…. In a certain sense the Jews are a Near Eastern element in Germany and a German element in Turkey."
Germany may not relish her kinship with these lost Teutonic tribes, butDr. Davis-Trietsch makes a satirical exposure of such scruples:
"It used to be a stock argument against the Jews that 'all nations' regarded them with equal hostility, but the War has brought upon the Germans such a superabundance of almost universal execration that the question which is the most despised of all nations—if one goes, not by justice and equity, but by the violence and extensiveness of the prejudice—might well now be altered to the Germans' disadvantage.
"In this unenviable competition for the prize of hate, Turkey, too, has a word to say, for the unspeakable Turk' is a rhetorical commonplace of English politics."
Having thus isolated the Jews from humanity and pilloried them with theGerman and the Turk, the writer expounds their function in theTurco-German system:
"Hitherto Germany has bothered herself very little about the Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. People in Germany hardly realised that, through the annual exodus of about 100,000 German-speaking Jews to the United States and England, the empire of the English language and the economic system that goes with it is being enlarged, while a German asset is being proportionately depreciated….
"The War found the Jewry of Eastern Europe in process of being uprooted, and has enormously accelerated the catastrophe. Galicia and the western provinces of Russia, which between them contain many more than half the Jews in the world, have suffered more from the War than any other region. Jewish homes have been broken up by hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt whatever that, as a result of the War, there will be an emigration of East European Jews on an unprecedented scale….
"The disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany…. It will no longer do simply to close the German frontiers to them, and in view of the difficulties which would result from a wholesale migration of Eastern Jews into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad to find a way out in the emigration of these Jews to Turkey—a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three parties concerned…."
And from this he passes to a wider vision:
"The German-speaking Jews abroad are a kind of German-speaking province which is well worth cultivation. Nine-tenths of the Jewish world speak German, and a good part of the remainder live in the Islamic world, which is Germany's friend, so that there are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry."
By this exploitation of aversions, Dr. Trietsch expects to deposit the Jews of the Pale over Western Asia as "culture-manure" for a German harvest; and if the Jewish migration to Palestine had remained nothing more than a stream of refugees, he might possibly have succeeded in his purpose. But in the last twenty years this Jewish movement has become a positive thing—no longer a flight from the Pale but a remembrance of Zion—and Zionism has already challenged and defeated the policy which Dr. Trietsch represents. "The object of Zionism," it was announced in theBasle Programme, drawn up by the first Zionist Congress in 1897, "is to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine." For the Zionists Jewry is a nation, and to become like other nations it needs its Motherland. In the Jewish colonies in Palestine they see not merely a successful social enterprise but the visible symbol of a body politic. The foundation of a national university in Jerusalem is as ultimate a goal for them as the economic development of the land, and their greatest achievement has been the revival of Hebrew as the living language of the Palestinian Jews. It was this that brought them into conflict with the Germanising tendency. In 1907 a secondary school was successfully started at Jaffa, by the initiative of Jewish teachers in Palestine, with Hebrew as the language of instruction; but in 1914, when a Jewish Polytechnic was founded at Haifa, the German-JewishHilfsverein, which had taken a leading part, refused to follow this precedent, and insisted on certain subjects being taught in German, not only in the Polytechnic, but in theHilfsverein'sother schools. The result was a secession of pupils and teachers. Purely Hebrew schools were opened; the Zionist organisation gave official support; and the Germanising party was compelled to accept a compromise which was in effect a victory for the Hebrew language.
Dr. Trietsch himself accepts this settlement, but does not abandon his idea:
"It was certainly impossible to expect the Spanish and Arabic-speaking Jews[46] to submit in their own Jewish country to the hegemony of the German language…. Only Hebrew could become the common vernacular language of the scattered fragments of Jewry drifting back to Palestine from all the countries of the world. But … in addition to Hebrew, to which they are more and more inclined, the Jews must have a world-language(Weltsprache),and this can only be German."
Anyone acquainted with the language-ordinances of Central Europe will feel that this suggestion veils a threat. What has been happening in Palestine during the War? Dr. Trietsch informs us that the Ottoman Government has been proceeding with the "naturalisation" of the Palestinian Jews, and that the "local execution of this measure has not been effected without disturbances which are beyond the province of this pamphlet." One significant consequence was the appearance in Egypt of Palestinian refugees, who raised a Zion mule corps there and fought through the Gallipoli campaign. What is the outlook for Palestine after the War? If the Ottoman pretension survives, the menace from Turkish Nationalism[47] and German resentment[48] is grave. But if Turk and German go, there are Zionists who would like to see Palestine a British Protectorate, with the prospect of growing into a British Dominion. Certainly, if the Jewish colonies are to make progress, they must be relieved of keeping their own police, building their own roads, and the other burdens that fall on them under Ottoman government, and this can only be secured by a better public administration. As for the British side of the question, we may consult Dr. Trietsch.
"There are possibilities," he urges, "in a German protectorate over the Jews as well as over Islam. Smaller national units than the 14 1-3 million Jews have been able to do Germany vital injury or service, and, while the Jews have no national state, their dispersion over the whole world, their high standard of culture, and their peculiar abilities lend them a weight that is worth more in the balance than many larger national masses which occupy a compact area of their own."
Other Powers than Germany may take these possibilities to heart.
Here, then, are peoples risen from the past to do what the Turks cannot and the Germans will not in Western Asia. There is much to be done—reform of justice, to obtain legal release from the Capitulations; reform in the assessment and collection of the agricultural tithes, which have been denounced for a century by every student of Ottoman administration; agrarian reform, to save peasant proprietorship, which in Syria, at any rate, is seriously in danger; genuine development of economic resources; unsectarian and non-nationalistic advancement of education. But the Jews, Syrians, and Armenians are equal to their task, and, with the aid of the foreign nations on whom they can count, they will certainly accomplish it. The future of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia is thus assured; but there are other countries—once as fertile, prosperous, and populous as they—which have lost not only their wealth but their inhabitants under the Ottoman domination. These countries have not the life left in them to reclaim themselves, and must look abroad for reconstruction.
If you cross the Euphrates by the bridge that carries the Bagdad Railway, you enter a vast landscape of steppes as virgin to the eye as any prairie across the Mississippi. Only thetells(mounds) with which it is studded witness to the density of its ancient population—for Northern Mesopotamia was once so populous and full of riches that Rome and the rulers of Iran fought seven centuries for its possession, till the Arabs conquered it from both.
The railway has now reached Nisibin, the Roman frontier fortress heroically defended and ceded in bitterness of heart, and runs past Dara, which the Persians never took. Westward lies Urfa—named Edessa by Alexander's men after their Macedonian city of running waters[49]; later the seat of a Christian Syriac culture whose missionaries were heard in China and Travancore; still famous, under Arab dominion, for its Veronica and 300 churches; and restored for a moment to Christendom as the capital of a Crusader principality, till the Mongols trampled it into oblivion and the Osmanlis made it a name for butchery.
From Urfa to Nisibin there can be fields again. The climate has not changed, and wherever the Bedawi pitches his tents and scratches the ground there is proof of the old fertility. Only anarchy has banished cultivation; for, since the Ottoman pretension was established over the land, 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 country a desert and make the other half a swamp. Yet the soil, when justly watered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Euphrates have deposited in what was originally the head of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it theSawâdor Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces—at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with theSawâdin fertility, but theSawâddoes not so readily yield up its wealth. To become something better than a wilderness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the grand scale and a mighty population—immense forces working for immense returns. In a strangely different environment it anticipated our modern rhythm of life by four thousand years, and then went back to desolation five centuries before Industrialism (which may repeople it) began.
TheSawâdwas first reclaimed by men who had already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and a mature religion—less civilised men would never have attempted the task. These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived ontellsheaped up above flood-level, eachtella city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the Arabian plateau. Sargon of Akkad and Naram Sin ruled the wholeSawâdas early as 2500 B.C.; Hammurabi, in 1900, already ruled it from Babylon; and the capital has never shifted more than sixty miles since then. Babylon on the Euphrates and Bagdad on the Tigris are the alternative points from which theSawâdcan be controlled. Just above them the first irrigation canals branch off from the rivers, and between them the rivers approach within thirty-five miles of each other. It is the point of vantage for government and engineering.
Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and theSawâdbecame a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power—Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs—and breathing out the works of man—grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion.
"The land," writes Herodotus[52], who saw it in its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and brought to harvest by water from the river—not, as in Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, but by human labour andshadufs[53] For Babylonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the largest of which is navigable. It is far the best corn-land of all the countries I know. There is no attempt at arboriculture—figs or vines or olives—but it is such superb corn-land that the average yield is two-hundredfold, and three-hundredfold in the best years. The wheat and barley there are a good four inches broad in the blade, and millet and sesame grow as big as trees—but I will not state the dimensions I have ascertained, because I know that, for anyone who has not visited Babylonia and witnessed these facts about the crops for himself, they would be altogether beyond belief."
Harnessed in the irrigation channels, the Tigris and Euphrates had become as mighty forces of production as the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtse and the Hoang-Ho.
"This," Herodotus adds[54], "is the best demonstration I can give of the wealth of the Babylonians: All the lands ruled by the King of Persia are assessed, in addition to their taxes in money, for the maintenance of the King's household and army in kind. Under this assessment the King is maintained for four months out of the twelve by Babylonia, and for the remaining eight by the rest of Asia together, so that in wealth the Assyrian province is equivalent to a third of all Asia."
The "Asia" over which the Achaemenids ruled included Russian Central Asia and Egypt as well as modern Turkey and Persia, and Egypt, under the same assessment, merely maintained the local Persian garrison[55]. Its money contribution was inferior too—700 talents as compared with Assyria's 1,000; and though these figures may not be conclusive, because the Persian "province of Assyria" probably extended over the northern steppes as well as theSawâd, it is certain that under the Arab Caliphate, when Irak and Egypt were provinces of one empire for the second time in history, Irak by itself paid 135 milliondirhems(francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and Egypt no more than 65 million, so that a thousand years ago the productiveness of theSawâdwas more than double that of the Nile.
Another measure of the land's capacity is the greatness of its cities. Herodotus gives statistics[56] of Babylon in the fifth century B.C.—walls 300 feet high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three- and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad straight streets intersecting one another at regular intervals, at right angles or parallel to the Euphrates. Any one who reads Herodotus' description of Babylon or Ibn Serapion's of Bagdad, and considers that these vast urban masses were merely centres of collection and distribution for the open country, can infer the density of population and intensity of cultivation over the face of theSawâd. When the Caliph Omar conquered Irak from the Persians in the middle of the seventh century A.D., and took an inventory of what he had acquired, he found that there were 5,000,000 hectares[57] of land under cultivation, and that the poll-tax was paid by 550,000 householders, which implies a total population, in town and country, of more than 5,000,000 souls, where a bare million and a half maintains itself to-day in city alleys and nomads' tents.
And in Omar's time theSawâdwas no longer at its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former (and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the Amara district a desert. The Persian Government, locked in a suicidal struggle with Rome, was powerless to make good the damage, and the shock of the Arab invasion made it irreparable[58]. Under the Abbasid Caliphs of Bagdad the rest of the country preserved its prosperity, but in the thirteenth century Hulaku the Mongol finished the work of the floods, and under Ottoman dominion theSawâdhas not recovered.
Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir WilliamWillcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and hisfinal conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up atBagdad in 1911[59].
"The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hectares…. All this land is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. The presence of 15 per cent. lime in the soil renders reclamation very easy compared with similar work in the dense clays of Egypt. One is never far away from the giant banks of old canals and the ruins of ancient towns."
But he does not expect to make all these 5,000,000 hectares productive simultaneously, as they are said to have been when Omar took his inventory. "It is water, not land, which measures production," and he reckons that the average combined discharge of the rivers would irrigate 3,000,000 hectares in winter, and in summer 400,000 of rice or 1,250,000 of other crops. This is the eventual maximum; for immediate reclamation he takes 1,410,000 hectares in hand. His project is practically to restore, with technical improvements, the ancient system of canals and drains, using the Euphrates water to irrigate everything west of the Tigris (down to Kut) and the Shatt-el-Hai, and the water of the Tigris and its tributaries for districts east of that line. Adding 33 per cent. for contingencies to his estimate for cost of materials and rates of labour, and doubling the total to cover interest on loans and subsequent development, he arrives at £29,105,020 (Turkish)[60] as the cost, from first to last, of irrigation and agricultural works together; and he estimates that the 1,410,000 hectares reclaimed by this outlay will produce crops to the value of £9,070,000 (Turkish) a year. In other words, the annual return on the gross expenditure will be more than 31 per cent., and under the present tithe system £7,256,000 (Turkish) of this will remain with the owners of the soil, while £1,814,000 will pass to the Government. This will give the country itself a net return of 24.9 per cent. on the combined gross cost of irrigation and agricultural works, while the Government, after paying away £443,000 (Turkish) out of its tithes for maintenance charges, will still receive a clear 9 per cent. per annum on the gross cost of irrigation, to which its share in the outlay will be confined.
Unquestionably, therefore, the enterprise is exceedingly profitable to all parties concerned. Looking further ahead, Sir William proposes to supersede the navigation of the Tigris[61] by railways, and so set free the whole discharge of the two rivers for irrigation. He contemplates handling annually 375,000 tons of cereals and 1,250,000 cwt. of cotton, and estimates the future by the effects of the Chenab Canal in Northern India—
"a canal traversing lands similar to those of Mesopotamia in their climate and in the condition in which they found themselves before the canal works were carried out…. In such a land, so like a great part of Mesopotamia, canals have introduced in a few years nearly a million of inhabitants, and the resurrection of the country has been so rapid that its very success was jeopardised by a railway not being able to be made quickly enough to transport the enormous produce."
"A million of inhabitants"—that is the crux of the problem. Labour is as necessary as water for the raising of crops; Sir William's barrages and canals without hands to turn them to account would be a dead loss instead of a profitable investment; but from what reservoir of population is this man-power to be introduced? The German economists are baffled by the difficulty.
"It is useless," as Rohrbach puts it, "to sink from 150 to 600 million marks in restoring the canal system, and then let the land lie idle, with all its new dams and channels, for lack of cultivators. Yet Turkey can never raise enough settlers for Irak by internal colonisation[62]."
She cannot raise them even for the minor enterprises at Konia and Adapa[63], and evidently theSawâdmust draw its future cultivators from somewhere beyond the bounds of Western Asia. From Germany, many Germans have suggested; but German experts curtly dismiss the idea. The first point Rohrbach makes in his book on the Bagdad Railway is that German colonisation in Anatolia is impossible for political reasons. "No worse service," he declares, "can be done to the German cause in the East than the propagation of this idea," and the rise of Turkish Nationalism has proved him right[64]. There remain the Arab lands;
"But even," he continues, "if the Turks thought of foreign colonisation in Syria and Mesopotamia, to hold the Arabs in check" (the political factor again), "that would be little help to us Germans, for only very limited portions of those countries have a climate in which Germans can work on the land or perform any kind of heavy manual labour."
And Germany herself is hard up for men.
"For all prospective developments in Turkey," writes Dr. Trietsch, "not merely scientific knowledge, capital, and organisation are wanted, but men, and Germany has no resources in men worth speaking of for opening up the Islamic world."
It is one of his arguments for bringing in the Jews, but the colonisation of Palestine will leave no Jews over for Irak. Rohrbach[65] disposes of the Mouhadjirs—they are a drop in the bucket, and are no more adapted to the climate than the Germans themselves. "There is really nothing for it," he bursts out in despair, "but the introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail."
That narrows the field to India and Egypt, and drives Turco-German policy upon the horns of a dilemma:
"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, arésuméis 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 theSawâd. 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 theSawâdto 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 theSawâd—"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.]
[Footnote 4: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]
[Footnote 5:The Near East, 30th March, 1917, p. 507; see also TekinAlp.]
[Footnote 6: The legendary ancestor of the Turkish race.]
[Footnote 7:The Near East, loc. cit.]
[Footnote 8: Which (for obvious reasons) was printed for private circulation only.]
[Footnote 9: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916).]
[Footnote 10: Memorial of the German authority cited above.]
[Footnote 11: Quoted by the German authority cited above.]
[Footnote 12: The Vilayets of Basra and Bagdad.]
[Footnote 13: See the journalAl-Mokattamof Cairo, 30th March, 31stMarch, 1st April, 1916 (English translation in the form of a pamphlet:"Syria during March, 1916," printed by Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd.,1916).]
[Footnote 14: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 253.]
[Footnote 15:Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey.]
[Footnote 16: Emir Hechmat, their chief, subsequently went to Hamadan inPersia and organised guerilla bands there.]
[Footnote 17:i.e., the Turkish-speaking population in the RussianCaucasus.]
[Footnote 18: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 80.]
[Footnote 19: And, like other Young Turks, a Jew ("Tekin Alp" being anom de plume).]
[Footnote 20: Moslemreligieux.]
[Footnote 21: Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes:Eindrucke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der Türkei, von Dr. MartinNiepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, z.Zt.Wernigerode. (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the SwissCommittee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, "TheHorrors of Aleppo." London, 1917: Hodder and Stoughton.)]
[Footnote 22: The writer includes Armenia under this term.]
[Footnote 23: Dated 3rd Aug., 1915: See Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 548.]
[Footnote 24: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 413.]
[Footnote 25: "Die deutsch-türkeschen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen," by Dr. Kurt Wiedenfeld, Professor of the Political Sciences at the University of Halle. (Duncker and Humblot, 1915).]
[Footnote 26: "Die Bagdadbahn," by Dr. Paul Rohrbach (Berlin, 1911), pp. 43, 44.]
[Footnote 27: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 49, 50.]
[Footnote 28: The author rubs in his point in his concluding section: "All economic measures we may take in Turkey are only a means to an end, not an end in themselves" (p. 77).]
[Footnote 29: Wiedenfeld's monograph is asonderabdruckfrom the two volumes of studies on the "Wirtschaftliche Annaherung zwischen dem deutschen Reich u. seinen Verbundeten," edited by Heinrich Herkner and published by theVerein fur Sozialpolitik, which preaches Naumann's creed.]
[Footnote 30: Just as, by a more gradual process, the Magyar Oligarchy, rather than the Hapsburg Dynasty, has become the instrument of German control over Austria-Hungary.]
[Footnote 31: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 29, 33.]
[Footnote 32: Page 23.]
[Footnote 33: Except by a branch line from Adana to Alexandretta, Rohrbach (pp. 27, 36, 37) laments the economic drawbacks of this strategic necessity.]
[Footnote 34: "Bagdadbahn," p.60.]
[Footnote 35: The German memorialised.]
[Footnote 36: "Bagdadbahn," pp. 39, 40.]
[Footnote 37: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 530. Major Count Wolf von Wolfskahl, who served as adjutant to Fakhri Pasha in the Turkish "punitive expedition" against Urfa, is mentioned as particularly guilty by a trustworthy neutral resident in Syria.]
[Footnote 38: On which Wiedenfeld lays stress, pp. 19, 22.]
[Footnote 39: "Leavening the Levant," by Rev. J. Greene, D.D. (Beston, 1916: The Pilgrim Press), p. 99.]
[Footnote 40: Excluding, of course, the hospital and educational endowments, and the salaries of the missionaries themselves.]
[Footnote 41:Hilal, 4th April, 1916, quoted in Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), pp. 654-6.]
[Footnote 42: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 309.]
[Footnote 43: Though the work of the American Presbyterian Mission atBeirût must not be forgotten.]
[Footnote 44: See "Zionism and the Jewish Future" (London, 1916: JohnMurray), pp. 138-170; for the agricultural machinery on the JewishNational Fund's Model Farm at Ben-Shamen, see the Report of the GermanVice-Consul at Jaffa for the year 1912.]
[Footnote 45: "Die Jüden der Türkei" (Leipzig, 1915: Veit u. Comp.). Pamphlet No. 8 of theDeutsches Vorderasienscomitee'sseries: "Länder u. Völker der Türkei."]
[Footnote 46: The Spanish-speaking Jews in Turkey are descended from refugees to whom the Ottoman Government gave shelter in the sixteenth century; the Arabic-speaking Jews have been introduced into Palestine from the Yemen, by the Zionists, since 1908.]
[Footnote 47: Dr. Trietsch admits that Jewish colonisation in Palestine was retarded because "the leading French and British Jews remained under the impression of the Armenian massacres" (of 1895-7) "as presented by the anti-Turkish, French and British Press…. In reality, the butcheries of Armenians in Constantinople were a convincing proof that the Jews in the Ottoman Empire were safe, for … not a hair on a Jewish head was touched." One wonders how he will exorcise the "impression" of 1915.]
[Footnote 48: As early as 1912 the German Vice-Consul at Jaffa betrayed his annoyance at the progress which Zionism was making. He admits indeed that "the falling off in trade last year would have been greater still than it was, if the economic penetration of Palestine were not reinforced by an idealistic factor in the shape of Zionism;" but he is piqued at the "Jewish national vanity" which makes it advisable for German firms to display their advertisements in Palestine in the Hebrew language and character.]
[Footnote 49: Edessa from Thracian [Greek:bedu] = Slavonicvoda.]
[Footnote 50:Muslinis named after Mosul, and cotton itself (inGreek, Latin, Arabic, and Turkish)bombyxorbambuk, after Bambyke(Mumbij).]
[Footnote 51: "Bagdadbahn," p. 38.]
[Footnote 52: Book I., ch. 193.]
[Footnote 53: Cp. Sir William Willcocks. "The Irrigation ofMesopotamia," p. 5 (London, 1911: Spon).]
[Footnote 54: Book I., ch. 192.]
[Footnote 55: Herodotus Book III., ch. 91.]
[Footnote 56: Book I., chs. 178-183.]
[Footnote 57: A hectare is approximately equal to two and a half acres.]
[Footnote 58: "The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate," by Guy le Strange(Cambridge, 1905: at the University Press), pp. 25-9.]
[Footnote 59: "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," by Sir William Willcocks,K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S. (London, 1911: Spon). The report is dated Bagdad,March 26th, 1911.]
[Footnote 60: £1.00 Turkish = approximately £0.90 sterling.]
[Footnote 61: In his immediate project he intends to keep the Tigris navigable, and allots £48,350 (Turkish) for its improvement.]
[Footnote 62: Cp. Wiedenfeld, pp. 62-4.]
[Footnote 63: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 57, 61.]
[Footnote 64: Cp. Wiedenfeld, p. 64.]
[Footnote 65: "Bagdadbahn," p. 83; cp. Trietsch, p. 11.]