"The last voyage I made before coming to this country," wrote Sir William Willcocks at Bagdad in 1911, "was up the Nile, from Khartûm to the great equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidden region I was filled with pride to think that I belonged to a race whose sons, 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.] [Footnote 4: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.] [Footnote 5: _The Near East_, 30th March, 1917, p. 507; see also Tekin Alp.] [Footnote 6: The legendary ancestor of the Turkish race.] [Footnote 7: _The Near East_, loc. cit.] [Footnote 8: Which (for obvious reasons) was printed for private circulation only.] [Footnote 9: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916).] [Footnote 10: Memorial of the German authority cited above.] [Footnote 11: Quoted by the German authority cited above.] [Footnote 12: The Vilayets of Basra and Bagdad.] [Footnote 13: See the journal _Al-Mokattam_ of Cairo, 30th March, 31st March, 1st April, 1916 (English translation in the form of a pamphlet: "Syria during March, 1916," printed by Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd., 1916).] [Footnote 14: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 253.] [Footnote 15: _Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey._] [Footnote 16: Emir Hechmat, their chief, subsequently went to Hamadan in Persia and organised guerilla bands there.] [Footnote 17: _i.e._, the Turkish-speaking population in the Russian Caucasus.] [Footnote 18: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 80.]