The House of Lords was crowded to hear Lord HARDINGE'S comments upon the Mesopotamia Report.

His object was not to defend himself, but to call attention to the splendid services that India had rendered to the Empire during the War in other fields than Mesopotamia.

And on the opposite fringes of the Arabic-speaking area there are fragments of population whose language is Semitic but pre-Arabicthe Jacobite Christians of the Tor-Abdin, and the Nestorians of the Upper Zab, who once, under the Caliphs, were the industrious Christian peasantry of Mesopotamia, but now are shepherds and hillmen among the Kurds.

The most terrible were the Mongols, who sacked Bagdad in 1258, and gave the coup de grâce to the civilisation of Mesopotamia.

The Ottoman Government, desiring a barrier against Persia, encouraged the Kurds to spread themselves over Armenia; it welcomed less the Shammar and Anazeh Arabs, who broke over the Euphrates about the year 1700 and turned the last fields of Northern Mesopotamia to desolation; but it was too impotent or indifferent to turn them out.

These prisoners were the leading men of SyriaChristians and Moslems without distinction; for in Syria, as in Armenia, the Turks put the leaders out of the way before they attacked the nation as a whole; most of the Syrian bishops had been deported or driven into hiding; by the beginning of March, 1916, it was reckoned that 816 Arabs in Syria and 117 in Mesopotamia had already been condemned to death with the confiscation of their property.

Only the tells (mounds) with which it is studded witness to the density of its ancient populationfor Northern Mesopotamia was once so populous and full of riches that Rome and the rulers of Iran fought seven centuries for its possession, till the Arabs conquered it from both.

The railway is the only capital enterprise that Northern Mesopotamia requires, for there is rain sufficient for the crops without artificial irrigation.

These will add field to field, but unless some stronger stream of immigration is led into the land, it will take many generations to recover its ancient prosperity; for in the ninth century A.D. Northern Mesopotamia paid Harun-al-Rashid as great a revenue as Egypt, and its cotton commanded the market of the world[50].

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.

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.

"In due time," the memorandum proceeds, "a comprehensive scheme for the whole of Mesopotamia must be carried out, but, apart from the question of expense, it is clear that the public works involved will not be justified until Turkey is in a position to colonise these extensive districts, and this question cannot be considered till we have succeeded in getting rid of the Capitulations.

"The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," p. 5 (London, 1911: Spon).]

[Footnote 59: "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," by Sir William Willcocks, K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S. (London, 1911: Spon).

Xenophon, in his Anabasis, speaks of ostriches in Mesopotamia being run down by fleet horses.

It was an axiom that the more resources you employed in Mesopotamia or in Palestine, the less resources remained available for France.

Ad supradictam Chaldæam iungitur Mesopotamia, et minor Armenia, et velut ad

In the Bible we read how the "rewards of divination" seduced from his allegiance to God the splendid enchanter of Mesopotamia: "In outline dim and vast Their fearful shadows cast The giant form of Empires on their way To ruin:one by one They tower

Marcus Antoninus organized the Second, which is in Noricum, and the Third, in Rhætia; these are also called Italian: Severus the Parthian legions, i. e., the First and the Third in Mesopotamia and between them the Second, the one in Italy.

[Footnote 18: "Lul-lu-bu," a country northward of Mesopotamia and Nizir.]

Murder in Mesopotamia.

The Comparative archeology of early Mesopotamia.

He relates how Sapor, king of Persia, besieged the strong city of Atrae, in the desert of Mesopotamia, for several years without being able to take it.

The fertile plain of Mesopotamia had been from immemorial antiquity the seat of great enterprises.