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Show Tower of Babel Is Again in Use-Mesopotamia's Use-Mesopotamia's Reclamation Sir William Willcock's Great Project Now in Course of Realization. By WILLIAM T. ELLIS. extensive experience In Irrigation work In India, has for years been calling call-ing the attention of the world to the irrigation possibilities of the delta of the Euphrates and the Tigris. There is. no good reason why the ancient productiveness of this district should not be restored. The water is still available, and the soil is as good as ever it was. The only reason for Its ancient productiveness which was so great that Herodotus was afraid to describe it in full lest his veracity be questioned was the system of canals maintained by the peoples of old. It is to be remembered that the dense populations which filled this delta in a former time were not savages sav-ages or barbarians; they represented alike the beginnings and the high-water high-water mark of ancient civilization. Greece and Rome were the heirs of this Eastern culture. Here it was that many of the fundamental inventions inven-tions of civilization had their origin. It was here that wheat and barley were first domesticated. Some of the sciences took their rise In this part of the world. A code of laws as old, or older, than the Mosaic, is now known to have prevailed in this Babylonian Baby-lonian civilization. For the present It Is enough to recall re-call that a complete and wonderful system of canals covered all the land known as lower Mesopotamia. Nothing Noth-ing like It Is known in modern times; engineers have freely conceded high praise to this achievement. Not until Sir William Willcocks took up the subject, .from high humanitarian motives, mo-tives, was the re-establlshment of the Babylonian canals ever seriously considered. con-sidered. His preliminary observations led him to broach the question, and .five years ago he undertook, on he-half he-half of the Turkish government, whose interest he had enlisted, the actual mapping out and beginning of a canal system. This he has done for a nominal nom-inal salary, which has straightway gone back Into the project. In some cases the lines of the old canals, which to this day are the outstanding of the scheme. Inasmuch as the Young Turks refuse to admit any settlers who will not become Turkish subjects. Otherwise the surplus peoples of India In-dia and Egypt, already trained to work on Irrigated land, would quickly find their way here. It Is not at all unlikely un-likely that within the next three years the chauvinistic Young Turka will have had a chastening that will remove re-move this difficulty. In any case there are the industrious Kurds of the mountains who would flock down In numbers, while the Moslem Persians have no scruples against exchanging their present sovereign for the caliph of all the faithful. Then there is the not unreasonable prospect that the roving Bedouin will settle down to agriculture, ag-riculture, when conditions become more stable in the land. Is This Germany's Chance? At present the delta Is a land of lawlessness. Some of the tribes along the lower reaches of the two rivers are little better than sheer savages. Everybody carries a gun or a stout cudgel, with a ball of pitch on the end. The lack of safety for the farmer farm-er is one reason for the abandonment of the old irrigation works. The new government, however, has vigorously undertaken the disarmament of the people and the establishment of law and order. If It succeeds In this a greater obstacle to the prosperity of Mesopotamia than any that confronts the engineers will have been overcome. over-come. Some persons there are who say that Germany should be permitted to fulfill her ambitions in this region. Everybody knows that a primary consideration con-sideration in the building of the Bagdad Bag-dad railway is to give Germany access ac-cess to the wheat and cotton fields of Mesopotamia. Here lies the potential granary which Germany so much needs. Here, too, may be grown the cotton for which her spindles are hungry. In all her projects looking, toward the Persian gulf she has been, hindered by Great Britain and Russia. Now a school of British statesmen, Babylon. Possibly the greatest present project of civilization, and certainly the most romantic, the reclamation of Mesopotamia, is now in course of actual realization. During the time of my sojourn in Mesopotamia the papers providing for the construction of these vast Irrigation Irri-gation works were signed by the Turkish Turk-ish government and Sir John Jackson, the distinguished British engineer, to whor the carrying on to completion of the Imperial project of Sir William Willcocks has been entrusted. Sir John has left one of his consulting engineers en-gineers In charge at Bagdad, and the other men of his staff are either already al-ready here or on the way. The magnificent mag-nificent conception of Sir William Willcocks, to give back to civilization the fertile land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, which was the birthplace of history, and the home of teeming millions cf people, is no longer a dream. So dramatic an event as the rehabilitation rehab-ilitation of this once-fertile land, now become a desert, is found to be full of startling aspects. Not the least of these I discovered when I came to Babylon and saw that what the archaeologists arch-aeologists are agreed upon as the remains re-mains of the Tower of Babel Is now practically a hole In the ground; and when I went out to the Hindia Barrage, Bar-rage, where the Willcocks engineers are at work, I saw the bricks from the Tower of Babel being ground up Into powder to make cement for the foundations foun-dations of the new barrage. There is a measure of fitness in this ancient tower of deliverance being used to help save the land from its thirsty aridity. Lest anybody accuse Sir William Wil-liam of being an iconoclast, it may be said that the bricks were taken from their original site 30 years ago by the Turkish government, which tried to build a dam that would send the wa-' ters of the Euphrates once more past Babylon, or, what meant more to It, past the modern town of Hiliah. Making the Garden of Eden Bloom. Sir William Willcocks, like all arch-aelogists arch-aelogists and students of the Bible, locates the Garden of Eden in the Tigris-Euphrates delta. Sir William fixes the site at a point west of Hit, the famous springs from which both antiquity and modern times secured vast supplies of bitumen. These smoking smok-ing and forbidding regions are said by some to have given the ancients their figure of the angels with the flaming swords at the gates of the garden. No doubt Is entertained by the archaeologists arch-aeologists that it was in this region that civilization had its birth. Here were the great empires of antiquity. From beneath the drifted dust and silting mud of Mesopotamia the scholars schol-ars with spades are digging up the wonderful stories of Babylon, Niffur, Tello, Ninevah and Asshur, while other "tells," or mounds, such as mark the site of TJr of the Chaldees, the city of Abraham's ancestors, await the coming of archaeological expeditions. The Garden Made a Desert. Mode of Carrying Baggage. ' among whom Sir William Willcocks may he counted, have arisen to ask for Germany the outlet that she go sorely needs. At present she is bottled bot-tled up. It is this very repression, argue the men of this new school, which makes Germany a menace to the peace of Europe and the world. Give her a iegtimate outlet, for her energies, and she will cease to keep the statesmen of other nations awake at night. I.i her take on Mesopotamia, Mesopo-tamia, or a large part of it, and she will have troubles enough right at hand, as well as a field for the labors la-bors of her surplus population. It would be inconsonance with the Ideals of the twentieth century, and in particular par-ticular with those of Sir William Willcocks, Will-cocks, if the great dream, and equally great achievements of this Briton, aided by others of King George's subjects, sub-jects, should be instrumental in delivering de-livering his country from the peril of German militarism, while at the same time doing an incalculable service to humanity. Back to the Garden of Eden. The immediate results of the new irrigation are fairly staggering. The land which within three years will be calling for settlers will, according to Sir William, be capable at once of producing a million tons of wheat and two million hundredweight of cotton, not to mention rice, dates, beans, barley, bar-ley, oats, melons, etc. Sir William has figured out an entire scheme for the most profitable order of crops. This scheme is at tho present moment visualized in mountains of new-plied earth, great canals, throbbing engines, growling stone-crushers, thumping pile-drivers pile-drivers (which use Lackawanna piles), and regiments of slow and singing Arab laborers. Here are in prospect the freights of the new Bagdad railway. rail-way. (Copyright, 1911, by Joseph B. Bowles.) As every traveler In this part of the world has remarked, the Moslem' Is ot a builder, but a waster. The statement Is commonly made concerning concern-ing the Arab, but it is equally true jf the Turk. It seems as If the fatalism fa-talism and physical excesses of Mohammedanism Mo-hammedanism cut the nerve of initiative initia-tive and endeavor. Certainly the followers fol-lowers of the Prophet found this region re-gion a garden; but they have made it i desert. I have traveled over a considerable con-siderable part of Mesopotamia, by kelek, horse, wagon, donkey, small boat and afoot. Everywhere the same Btory is repeated. It is all poverty, ruin and desolation. The Arabs live in the same black tents that Solomon sang about, or else in miserable mud hovels. They have none of the conveniences con-veniences of civilization. Life Is a hand-to-mouth existence. The appliances appli-ances of agriculture are primitive beyond be-yond belief a small triangular shovel, a little hoe about the size and shape of an adze, and a sharpened stick for a plow. Only a small strip of territory, lying along the rivers, or the few subsidiary canals that remain, is cultivated. Water Wa-ter is raised by the "cherit," a leather bucket let down to the stream, and hauled up by oxen, donkeys, camels or cows. The process is cumbersome, expensive and inadequate. In a few places oil engines and pumps made In Britain and America, have displaced the cumbersome cherit, and it seems inevitable that they should become general in the new day that is dawning dawn-ing for Mesopotamia. Back of these cultivated areas lies the Mesopotamia desert. I have traversed sections of it where not a plant bigger than the camel thorn could be seen. It looks quite as desolate deso-late as the sandy Arabian desert to the west of the Euphrates. Yet it is every foot good gray earth, friable and productive, needing only water to make it pour forth crops to enrich the markets of civilization and to deliver the present population from dire poverty. pov-erty. And the water is still available, as fully as It was when this region was the world's granary. "The Father of the Nile dams," Sir William Willcocks, who has also had feature of Mesopotamian scenery, are followed. In others, newer methods, made possible by modern engineering skill, are employed. A Livelihood for New Millions. The Willcocks operations, which the engineering firm of Sir John Jackson take over at the first of April, provide for two great works to be completed in less than three years. One of these is the Hindia Barrage, which will cause once more to flow "the rivers of Babylon," now practically dry, and the Habbania Escape, further up the Euphrates, at Ramadi. When these have been completed, with their incidental in-cidental canals (and the Hindia Barrage Bar-rage may be ready in a year and a half), three million acres of land that is at present arid, will be available for cultivation. The only real obstacle feared by those engaged in the work is the lack of stablemlndedness of the Turkish government, and Its depleted treasury. This latter point is covered, it is understood in these parts, by the terms of the contract with Sir John Jackson, who practically finances the undertaking, recouping himself from the income off the new lands, receiving receiv-ing what is equivalent to seven per cent, on the investment. At present the area affected by the irrigation project contains about a million and a half of population. These are mostly poor Arabs, who subsist on a pittance, so that thousands of them are glad to get work on the new canals and barrages at 12 cents a day. The women and children make even less than this, while some of the foremen fore-men and picked workmen receive as much as 25 cents a day. All, however, are learning, to a degree, the babh's of steady industry which will stand them in stead when they come to take up the land that is being redeemed by their present labors. Sir William Willcocks Will-cocks is authority for the statement that there should be a livelihood for twelve million people In the reclaimed area. Where these extra ten and a half millions of population are to come from gives concern to some students |