The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French protectorate:  it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia.  Just as no other Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf.  As Germany very well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of world-conquest.  Equally vital to England was it that Germany should never get it.  But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated here:  it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen, England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers.  Even Germany, in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth.  Therein she was perfectly right—­she usually is right in these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical—­for she seems dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia.  But nowhere can I find that she guessed it:  I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf.  Northern Mesopotamia, as Dr. Rohrbach points out in his Bagdadbahn, needs only the guarantee of security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread and something of the ancient prosperity return.  The land is immensely fertile:  it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life.  The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will naturally spread there:  it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.