the whole discharge of the two rivers for irrigation. He contemplates
handling annually 375,000 tons of cereals and 1,250,000 cwt. of cotton,
and estimates the future by the effects of the Chenab Canal in Northern
India--

"a canal traversing lands similar to those of Mesopotamia in their
climate and in the condition in which they found themselves before the
canal works were carried out.... In such a land, so like a great part of
Mesopotamia, canals have introduced 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 _Sawâd_ 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