But now comes the difficulty:  the construction of the irrigation works is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and ’the ancient river,’ the river Euphrates, run their course.  But all the irrigation works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops.  A million are necessary:  where are they to come from?  And the answer is ‘Egypt and India.’

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with hope of success.  Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose Bagdadbahn I have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution to the man-power problem except by the ’introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.’  It is true that he starts upon the assumption that Mesopotamia will remain Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines), with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite correct.  Even under German protection he realises that citizens of well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire.  Their numbers are even more inadequate since the Armenian massacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach’s Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad.  He does not positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses it.  His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but that, I feel sure, is his vision:  ’he sees it, but not now; he beholds it, but not nigh.’

But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since for the English it is clearly more easily realisable.  The native labour we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty.  But no Power except England can furnish it.  And that, I submit, is the solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world.  And I cannot do better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very noble words from Sir William Willcocks’s report, in which he speaks of the desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked stewardship.