"There are possibilities," he urges, "in a German protectorate over the
Jews as well as over Islam. Smaller national units than the 14 1-3
million Jews have been able to do Germany vital injury or service, and,
while the Jews have no national state, their dispersion over the whole
world, their high standard of culture, and their peculiar abilities
lend them a weight that is worth more in the balance than many larger
national masses which occupy a compact area of their own."

Other Powers than Germany may take 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