With these suggestions, Anatolia and Turkish Nationalism may be
dismissed from our survey. Shorn of their pretensions in Armenia and the
countries south of Taurus, the Turks may experiment in the art of
government without the tragedies which their present domination has
brought upon mankind. The other lands and peoples of Western Asia, when
they have ceased to be "Turkey," will be restored once more to the
civilised world. What forces will shape their growth? Not, even
indirectly, the discrowned Turk, for if he were not banned by his crimes
he would still be doomed by his incapacity.
The relative qualities of the different Near Eastern races are not in
doubt. A German teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, who
resigned his appointment as a protest against the Armenian atrocities in
1915, thus records his personal judgment in an open letter to the
Reichstag[21]:
"The Young Turk is afraid of the Christian nationalities—Armenians,
Syrians and Greeks—on account of their cultural and economic
superiority, and he sees in their religion a hindrance to Turkifying
them by peaceful means. They must therefore be exterminated or
converted to Islam by force. The Turks do not suspect that in so doing
they are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting themselves. Yet
who is to help Turkey forward if not the Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians,
who constitute more than a quarter of the population of the Empire? The
Turks, the least gifted of the races living in Turkey, are themselves
only a minority of the population, and are still far behind the Arabs in
culture. Where is there any Turkish trade, Turkish handicraft, Turkish
industry, Turkish art, Turkish science? They have even borrowed their
law and religion from the conquered Arabs, and their language, so far as
it has been given literary form.
"We teachers, who have been teaching Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks,
and Jews in German schools in Turkey for years, can only pass judgment
that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the most unwilling and the
least talented. When for once in a way a Turk does achieve something,
one can be sure in nine cases out of ten that one is dealing with a
Circassian, an Albanian, or a Turk with Bulgarian blood in his veins.
From my personal experience I can only prophesy that the Turks proper
will never achieve anything in trade, industry, or science.
"We are told now in the German Press about the Turks' hunger for
education, and of how they are thronging eagerly to learn German. There
is even a report of language courses for adults which have been started
in Turkey. They have certainly been started, but with what result? One
reads of the language course at a technical school which began with
twelve Turkish teachers as pupils. Our informant forgets to add,
however, that after four lessons only six pupils presented themselves;
after five, five; after six, four; and after seven only three, so that
after eight lessons the course broke down, through the indolence of the
pupils, before it had properly commenced. If the pupils had been
Armenians they would have persevered till the end of the school year,
learnt industriously, and finished with a respectable mastery of the
German language."
From a German teacher who has worked in Turkey for three years this
verdict is crushing, and Tekin Alp himself virtually admits the charge.
"It is true," he writes, "that the Turkish character is usually lacking
in the qualities most essential to trade or economic undertakings, but
these may be acquired by a reasonable and methodical training and
organisation." The only "organisation" that seems to occur to him is the
Boycott, which has been popular with the Turks since the Revolution of
1908.
"The unaccommodating attitude of the Greek Government was sufficient
excuse," he remarks, in reference to the Boycott of 1912. "The real
motive, however, was the longing of the Turkish nation for independence
in their own country. The Boycott, which was at first directed solely
against the Greeks, was then extended to the Armenians and other
non-Mohammedan circles, and was carried out with undiminished energy.
This movement, which lasted in all its rigour for several months, caused
the ruin of hundreds of small Greek and Armenian tradesmen…. The
systematic and rigorous Boycott is now at an end, but the spirit it
created in the people still persists…. It can now be asserted that the
movement for restoring the economic life of Turkey is on the right
road."
The real effects of the Boycott of 1912 are described by the German
authority whose memorial has several times been cited in this article.
He tells us how, under the patronage of the Young Turkish Government,
associations were formed which intimidated the Moslem peasants into
buying from them, when they came to market, instead of from the
Christians with whom they had formerly dealt.
"The peasants came to their old dealers," the memorial continues,
"lamented their fate, and asked their advice as to how they could save
themselves from the hands of their fellow-countrymen. They were
delighted when at last the Boycott came to an end and they could once
more buy from Greeks and Armenians, where they were well served and got
good value for their money."
If the Turkish Nationalists had confined themselves to economic weapons,
the Turks' economic ineptitude would have prevented them from doing
serious harm; but by abusing the political and military powers of the
Ottoman State to perpetrate the recent atrocities they have struck a
mortal blow at the prosperity of Western Asia.
"In the whole of Asia Minor, with perhaps one or two exceptions," the
same German authority states, "there is not a single pure Turkish firm
engaged in foreign trade…. The extermination of the Armenian
population means not only the loss of from 10 to 25 per cent. of the
total population of Anatolia[22], but, what is most serious, the
elimination of those elements in the population which are the most
highly developed economically and have the greatest capacity for
civilisation…."
And this is the universal judgment of those in a position to know.
"The result of the deportations," the American Consul at Aleppo declares
in an official report[23], "is that, as 90 per cent. of the commerce of
the interior is in the hands of the Armenians, the country is facing
ruin. The great bulk of business being done on credit, hundreds of
prominent business men other than Armenians are facing bankruptcy. There
will not be left in the places evacuated a single tanner, moulder,
blacksmith, tailor, carpenter, clay-worker, weaver, shoemaker, jeweller,
pharmacist, doctor, lawyer, or any of the professional people or
tradesmen, with very few exceptions, and the country will be left in a
practically helpless state."
The German memorialist presses the indictment:
"You cannot become a merchant by murdering one. You cannot master a
handicraft if you smash its tools. A sparsely-populated country does not
become more productive if it destroys its most industrious population.
You do not advance the progress of civilisation if you drive into the
desert, as the scapegoat for decades and centuries of wasted
opportunities, the element in your population which shows the greatest
economic ability, the greatest progressiveness in education, and the
greatest energy in every respect, and which was fitted by nature to
build the bridge between East and West. You only corrupt your own sense
of right if you tread the rights of others under foot. The popularity of
an unpopular war may temporarily be promoted among the Turkish masses by
the destruction and spoliation of the non-Mohammedan elements—the
Armenians most of all, but also, in part, the Syrians, Greeks,
Maronites, and Jews—but thoughtful Mohammedans, when they realise the
whole damage which the Empire has sustained, will lament the economic
ruin of Turkey most bitterly, and will come to the conclusion that the
Turkish Government has lost infinitely more than it can ever win"—it is
a German writing—"by victories at the front."
"We may call it political necessity or what not," declared an American
travelling in Anatolia during the deportations of 1915, "but in essence
it is a nominally ruling class, jealous of a more progressive race,
striving by methods of primitive savagery to maintain the leading
place[24]."
What forces will be released in Western Asia when the Turk has met his
fate? Who will repair the ruin he leaves behind?
The Germans? They have been penetrating Turkey economically for the
last thirty years. They have organised regular steamship services
between German and Turkish ports, multiplied the volume of Turco-German
trade, and extended their capital investments, particularly in the
Ottoman Debt and the construction of railways. In 1881, when the Debt
was first placed under international administration, Germany held only
4.7 per cent., of it, and was the sixth in importance of Turkey's
creditors; by 1912 she held 20 per cent., and was second only to
France[25]. Her railway enterprises, more ambitious than those of any
other foreign Power, have brought valuable concessions in their
train—harbour works at Haidar Pasha and Alexandretta, irrigation works
in the Konia oasis and the Adana plain, and the prospect, when the
Bagdad Railway reaches the Tigris, of tapping the naphtha deposits of
Kerkuk[26]. Dr. Rohrbach, the German specialist on the Near East,
forecasts the profits of the Bagdad Railway from the results of Russian
railway-building in Central Asia. He prophesies the cultivation of
cotton, in the regions opened up by the line, on a scale which will
cover an appreciable part of the demands of German industry, and will
open a corresponding market for German wares among the new
cotton-growing population[27]. "Yet the decisive factor in the Bagdad
Railway," he counsels his German readers, "is not to be found in these
economic considerations but in another sphere."
Dr. Wiedenfeld drives this home.
"Germany's relation to Turkey," his monograph begins, "belies the
doctrine that all modern understandings and differences between nations
have an economic origin. We are certainly interested in the economic
advancement of Turkey … but in setting ourselves to make Turkey strong
we have been influenced far more by our political interests as a State
among States (das politische, das staatlich-machtliche Interesse).
Even our economic activity has primarily served this aim, and has in
fact originated to a large extent in the purely politico-military
problems (aus den unmittelbaren Machtaufgaben) which confronted the
Turkish Government. Exclusively economic considerations play a very
subordinate part in Turco-German relations…. Our common political
aims, and Germany's interest in keeping open the land-route to the
Indian Ocean, will make it more than ever imperative for us to
strengthen Turkey economically with all our might, and to put her in a
position to build up, on independent economic foundations, a body
politic strong enough to withstand all external assaults. The means will
still be economic; the goal will be of a political order[28]."
And Dr. Rohrbach formulates the political goal with startling precision.
After twelve pages of disquisition on recent international diplomacy he
brings his thesis to this point: the Bagdad Railway links up with the
railways of Syria, and
"The importance of the Syrian railway system lies in this, that, if the
need arose, it would be the direct instrument for the exercise of
pressure upon England … supposing that German-Austro-Turkish
co-operation became necessary in the direction of Egypt."
Written as it was in 1911, this is a remarkable anticipation of Turkish
strategic railway-building since the outbreak of war; but it is
infinitely remote in purpose from the economic regeneration of Western
Asia, and even when the German publicists reckon in economic values they
generally betray their political design.
"The special point for Germany," Dr. Wiedenfeld lays down, in discussing
the agricultural possibilities of the Ottoman territories, "is that to a
large extent crops can be grown here which supplement our own economic
resources in important respects…. In peace time, of course, no one
would think of transporting goods of such bulk as agricultural products
any way but by sea; but the War has impressed on us with brutal
clearness the value for us of being able on occasions of extreme
necessity to import cotton from Turkey by land."
Thus Germany's economic activity in Turkey has been not for prosperity
but for power, not for peace but for war. In developing Turkey, Germany
is simply developing the "Central Europe" scheme of a military combine
self-contained economically and challenging the world in arms[29].
Germany is concerned with Turkey, not for her splendid past and future,
but for her miserable present; for Turkey—as she is, and only as she
is—is a vital chequer on the chess-board where Germany has been playing
her game of world power, or "des staatlich-machtlichen Interessens," as
Dr. Wiedenfeld would say. Therefore Germany does not eye the lands and
peoples under Ottoman dominion with a view to their common advantage and
her own. She selects a "piece" among them which she can keep under her
thumb and so control the square. Abd-ul-Hamid was her first pawn, and
when the Young Turk Party swept him off the board she adopted them and
their colour[30]; for by hook or by crook, through this agency or that,
Turkey had to be commanded or Germany's play was spoilt.
Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the maintenance of a corrupt
minority in power—too weak and corrupt to remain in it without
Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it
at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home in return for servitude in
diplomacy and war—the deal is called "Hegemony," and is as old as
Ancient Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Government Germany
threatens the British and Russian Empires from all the Ottoman
frontiers; and with the free hand that is their price the Young Turks
inflict on all lands and peoples within those frontiers whatever evils
conduce to the maintenance of their pretensions.
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, and vice 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 German
Kultur—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 the
Adapa 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 German
Kulturpolitik. 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
German Kulturpolitik of 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 the
Gospel[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 German Reichstag, 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, pogroms of 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, but
Dr. 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 the
German and the Turk, the writer expounds their function in the
Turco-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
the Basle 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-Jewish Hilfsverein, 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 the
Hilfsverein's other 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 the tells (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 the Sawâd or 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 the Sawâd in fertility, but the Sawâd does 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.
The Sawâd was 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 on tells heaped up above flood-level, each
tell a 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 whole Sawâd
as 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 the Sawâd can 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 the Sawâd became 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 and shadufs[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 the Sawâd, 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 million dirhems
(francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and Egypt no more than
65 million, so that a thousand years ago the productiveness of the
Sawâd was 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 the Sawâd. 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 the Sawâd was 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
the Sawâd has not recovered.
Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir William
Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his
final conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at
Bagdad 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 the Sawâd must 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, a résumé is 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 the
Sawâd. 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 the Sawâd to 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 the Sawâd—"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 Tekin
Alp.]
[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 journal Al-Mokattam of Cairo, 30th March, 31st
March, 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 in
Persia and organised guerilla bands there.]
[Footnote 17: i.e., the Turkish-speaking population in the Russian
Caucasus.]
[Footnote 18: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 80.]
[Footnote 19: And, like other Young Turks, a Jew ("Tekin Alp" being a
nom de plume).]
[Footnote 20: Moslem religieux.]
[Footnote 21: Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes:
Eindrucke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der Türkei, von Dr. Martin
Niepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, z.Zt.
Wernigerode. (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the Swiss
Committee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, "The
Horrors 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 a sonderabdruck from the two
volumes of studies on the "Wirtschaftliche Annaherung zwischen dem
deutschen Reich u. seinen Verbundeten," edited by Heinrich Herkner and
published by the Verein 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 at
Beirût must not be forgotten.]
[Footnote 44: See "Zionism and the Jewish Future" (London, 1916: John
Murray), pp. 138-170; for the agricultural machinery on the Jewish
National Fund's Model Farm at Ben-Shamen, see the Report of the German
Vice-Consul at Jaffa for the year 1912.]
[Footnote 45: "Die Jüden der Türkei" (Leipzig, 1915: Veit u. Comp.).
Pamphlet No. 8 of the Deutsches Vorderasienscomitee's series: "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] = Slavonic voda.]
[Footnote 50: Muslin is named after Mosul, and cotton itself (in
Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Turkish) bombyx or bambuk, after Bambyke
(Mumbij).]
[Footnote 51: "Bagdadbahn," p. 38.]
[Footnote 52: Book I., ch. 193.]
[Footnote 53: Cp. Sir William Willcocks. "The Irrigation of
Mesopotamia," 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.]