It is interesting, too, to find that even that younger civilization has its monument here among the tombs of the old. Babylon fell before the Persian, and her glory passed away. But when the Persian fell before the Greek Alexander, that last of the great kings of the East showed himself the first of modern rulers also, in that he had dreams of uniting ancient East and modern West in one great empire. It was a dream that passed with the dreamer; though it has been revived time and again since, and noble men will spend and be spent for it even now. Alexander had ideas of transplanting the finest flower of Greek culture to his new capital in the East--for such he intended Babylon to be. The dramas of Æschylus and Sophocles should be performed in ancient and restored Babylon; and with that object he ordered the construction of a Greek theatre of the best pattern of his day, in the mud brick of Babil. Strange parable of his great dreams, and strange exotic too, it stands to this day in the suburbs of Babylon; a memorial to all time of that first effort of the West to educate and assimilate the East--that East which it found so easy to overrun and so impossible to understand. So "Babylon, the glory of nations, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency," stands now uncovered for an hour, though a short time will see her hidden once more, and perhaps finally removed to form the material for modern houses. Meantime, what of the land itself, which was the garden of the earth once, and is little but a mixture of swamp and desert now? The waters that men taught to make the land fruitful have been only its destruction when they were left uncontrolled. Will the great scheme that an English engineer has put forward make the land a garden once more? It can, of course--on the condition that it is properly managed. For nothing can take away the marvellous fertility of the soil; and there will be water for irrigation as long as the snow falls on Hakkiari and Ararat to feed the Tigris and the Euphrates. If the work is managed, when finished, by the men who designed and executed it, it will do as much for the delta of Mesopotamia as the "Barrage" of the Nile has done for its delta, or the dam of Assouan for upper Egypt. But the Barrage, when built, stood absolutely useless for decades, because those who ruled the country would not trust the builders to administer their own work, fearing the power that such a position would give them in the land that they were saving. Will those men of the same stock who rule in Mesopotamia submit to govern by foreign advice, and so save the country? Or will they say (as they have always thought hitherto), "We cannot save our rule by compliance. Let the land go to ruin, and the people too. At least it is ours, and we will rule it to the end."