d 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 _Sawad_ 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 des