even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face
of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new
agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of
life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt if,
in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the
richest and most famous tract of the world, I had thought that I was a
scion of a race in whose hands God had placed, for hundreds of years,
the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give
no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty
rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine
months in the year, and desolating everything in their way for the
remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make"--she was then still
mistress of the _Sawâd_--"can be too great to roll away the reproach of
these parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven."

Turkey, which claims the present in Western Asia, is nothing but an
overthrow of the past and an obstruction of the future.




[Footnote 1: Tekin Alp: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal" (Weimar:
Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1915). The percentage is of course an exaggeration.]

[Footnote 2: In the sense of having preceded Arabic in this region, for
in itself, and in its original area, Arabic is as old a language an any
other variety of Semitic.]

[Footnote 3: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]