Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/38

 chief cotton-growing regions. In antiquity the Land of the Two Rivers was an important center of cotton production, and recent experiments have held out great inducements for a revival of cotton culture there. The climate of Mesopotamia is ideal for such a purpose. The length of the summer season is from six to seven months, with a constantly rising temperature, as contrasted with a shorter season and variable temperatures in America and Egypt. Frost is almost unknown. Rainfall is plentiful during the early part of the year and scarce, as it should be, during the growing period. The soil contains a good percentage of the essential phosphorus, potash, and nitrogen. It is believed that Mesopotamia can grow cotton as good as the best Egyptian and better than the best American product and at a considerably higher yield per acre.[14]

Extravagant prophecies have been made regarding the rôle of irrigation in bringing about an agricultural renaissance in Turkey-in-Asia. A writer in the Vienna Zeit of August 31, 1901, predicted that as soon as the economic effects of irrigation and of the Bagdad Railway should be fully realized, "Anatolia, northern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Irak together will export at least as much grain as all of Russia exports to-day." Dr. Rohrbach claimed that this probably would prove to be an exaggeration, but that certainly Mesopotamia would become one of the great granaries of the world.[15] Sir William Willcocks, the distinguished English engineer who had planned and supervised the construction of the famous irrigation works of the Nile, was no less enthusiastic about the prospects of Mesopotamia. "With the Euphrates and Tigris floods really controlled," he wrote, "the delta of the two rivers would attain a fertility of which history has no record; and we should see men coming from the West, as well as from the East, making the Plain of Shinar a rival of the land of Egypt. The flaming swords of inundation and