ake 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
lan