Extravagant prophecies have been made regarding the rôle of irrigation in bringing about an agricultural renaissance in Turkey-in-Asia. A writer in the Vienna _Zeit_ of August 31, 1901, predicted that as soon as the economic effects of irrigation and of the Bagdad Railway should be fully realized, “Anatolia, northern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Irak together will export at least as much grain as all of Russia exports to-day.” Dr. Rohrbach claimed that this probably would prove to be an exaggeration, but that certainly Mesopotamia would become one of the great granaries of the world.[15] Sir William Willcocks, the distinguished English engineer who had planned and supervised the construction of the famous irrigation works of the Nile, was no less enthusiastic about the prospects of Mesopotamia. “With the Euphrates and Tigris floods really controlled,” he wrote, “the delta of the two rivers would attain a fertility of which history has no record; and we should see men coming from the West, as well as from the East, making the Plain of Shinar a rival of the land of Egypt. The flaming swords of inundation and drought would have been taken out of the hands of the offended Seraphim, and the Garden of Eden would have again been planted.... Speaking in less poetical language we might say that the value of every acre in the joint delta of the two rivers would be immediately trebled before the irrigation works were carried out, and again increased many fold more the day the works were completed. Every town and hamlet in the valley from Bagdad to Basra would find itself freed from the danger, expense, and intolerable nuisance of flooding, and the resurrection of this ancient land would have been an accomplished fact.”[16] Here in the Near East, then, was a great empire awaiting exploitation by Western capital and Western technical skill. No man could adequately predict its ultimate contributions in raw materials to Western industry, or accurately foretell its ultimate capacity in consumption of the products of Western factories, or confidently prophesy its final rôle in the promotion of Western commerce. But a trained and intelligent observer, surveying the situation at the opening of the twentieth century, could have said with a certain amount of assurance that there were two essential conditions to even a partial realization of the economic possibilities of the Ottoman Empire: the provision of adequate railway communications and the establishment of political security. The former of these conditions was met, in part, during the régime of Abdul Hamid and his successors, the Young Turks. The second, in spite of earnest efforts by loyal Ottomans, has not yet been satisfied. FORCES ARE AT WORK FOR REGENERATION