“It is the direct route to India. It is the shortest and the cheapest both for constructing and working a railway; so free from engineering difficulties, that it almost appears as though designed by the hand of nature to be the highway of nations between the east and the west; the most surely defensible by England—both of its termini being on the open seas; and the most likely to prove remunerative. “Both in an engineering and a political point of view, the Euphrates route undoubtedly possesses great advantages over any of the others which have been proposed. “All the routes which have been suggested from places on the Black Sea are open to the fatal objection that, while they would be of the greatest service to Russia, they would be altogether beyond the control of Great Britain, while the engineering difficulties with which they are surrounded, are of themselves sufficient to exclude them from practical consideration. “This has been fully established by the evidence of the witnesses examined by the Select Committee of the House of Commons, which lately investigated the merits of the various proposals for connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Seas with the Persian Gulf. “In the course of the investigation by the Committee, it was demonstrated that the proposed Euphrates Valley Railway is an eminently feasible undertaking in an engineering sense; that the route of the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf is decidedly preferable in respect of climate to that by Egypt and the Red Sea; that as regards the safety and facility of the navigation, the Persian Gulf also has by far the advantage; that the proposed undertaking would be of great commercial moment, and if not immediately profitable, at all events that it would be so at a date not far distant; and, finally, that it would be of the highest political and strategic importance to this country. “A railway through Mesopotamia, as a route to India, would not at first be productive of much income to a company from traffic, but in a few years—certainly before the railway could be finished—the cultivation of grain would increase a hundred-fold, and would go on increasing a thousand fold, and would attain to a magnitude and extension quite impossible to calculate, because bad harvests are almost unknown in these parts, for there is always plenty of rain and a hot sun to ripen the corn. Populous villages would spring up all along the line, as there is abundance of sweet water everywhere. Cereals can be grown there so cheaply, that no country the same distance from England—say for instance Russia—could compete with it at all. And if Great Britain finds it necessary to rely more on the importation of foreign corn, where could a better field be found than the fertile plains of Mesopotamia, which has all the advantages of climate, soil, and sun in its favour?