Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/39

 drought would have been taken out of the hands of the offended Seraphim, and the Garden of Eden would have again been planted Speaking in less poetical language we might say that the value of every acre in the joint delta of the two rivers would be immediately trebled before the irrigation works were carried out, and again increased many fold more the day the works were completed. Every town and hamlet in the valley from Bagdad to Basra would find itself freed from the danger, expense, and intolerable nuisance of flooding, and the resurrection of this ancient land would have been an accomplished fact."[16]

Here in the Near East, then, was a great empire awaiting exploitation by Western capital and Western technical skill. No man could adequately predict its ultimate contributions in raw materials to Western industry, or accurately foretell its ultimate capacity in consumption of the products of Western factories, or confidently prophesy its final rôle in the promotion of Western commerce. But a trained and intelligent observer, surveying the situation at the opening of the twentieth century, could have said with a certain amount of assurance that there were two essential conditions to even a partial realization of the economic possibilities of the Ottoman Empire: the provision of adequate railway communications and the establishment of political security. The former of these conditions was met, in part, during the régime of Abdul Hamid and his successors, the Young Turks. The second, in spite of earnest efforts by loyal Ottomans, has not yet been satisfied.

Probably there was no group of men more fully aware of the needs of Turkey than the members of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. They were concerned, it is