The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-12-11

den spot of the continent. The taxes for the water can be absolutely relied on to be less than the losses from droutn or too heavy rainfall or from frost ana hail in territories which eoend on a natural water supply.
 The first great undertaking Tn the IT. rigation line in the Soudan problem was: of course. the construction or the nrst dam, 16 miles south of where the Biue Nile flows out of Lake Lsana. AL ,n's point the Blue Nile Is, slightly oVesr. mile and a half in width, and just after 1t leaves the body of the lake It mas - very heavy fall and Tor q greaeSS' aS ,pHbts means that the engineering ullhcuiits shou4d not be as severe as Tn the nlaLn ta Nile. where the great dam nao entaiIo , iI ing deep excavations for proper pea. Moreover, the sides of the dam nelt Lake Tsana are formed or staoi,5 i,55r1ense ,e amount of concrete and granlte @ @Sun- struction The loss of water, thereloIe' will be comparatively small leaRase an6 gv ing almost out of the queastln92hII;, noni anu when the system of locks is nnllly eon- pn structed in the river bed between hoo11 saries and Khartoum oither tne cai,l side Thus n summer irrigation of Ghezlren ,iia V, the eastern provinces will pc easliy ,l ana ,ra simply effected ,Supplemenlt,aryo o,s,r ssoiabb tbe small rivers of the Soudan How into @ @s,,s Blue Nile. The Atbara, sltuatoh ias nas already. been explaineda' and tho ninder
 
 and Rahad Rivers.
 TO BE COMPLETE BY 1910.
 By 1910. then. at the latest. the tielns of the Soudan should be green with mll- let and corn, while the most important crop is expected to prove the hne Bgyp- tian cotton which eXcels the Americau product, and may yet make Egypt one of the wealthiest countries in the world. France now realizes more bitterly than ever the importance of the tashoua ln cident. Driven back from the 9op,,,t upper eto to of the Soudan. too wise to attempt to coerce Abyssnia where Menelik dasned the hopes and slaughtered the sqlaiers of Italy. France may now uennlteiy see the restriction of her African Inliuence to that almost worthless strip of land edging the Southern Mediterranean coast. With an irrigated Soudan one finds inevitably an irritated France, put while France may prove irritaple. she will hardly prove intractable.
 The spending of what will total sou'- 900 in forcing the waters of Lake Tsana to hold their dashing forces ana to gently ripple as the need arises over the sands of the Soudan is undoubtedly a political triumph for Great Britain. yet to the world at large and the Sou- danese in particular the constant en- croachment of Great Britain, however prompted by selfish absorption of ter- ritory, can only prove an unalloyed blessing The triumph or the brlton III Africa is merely a case of the survival of the Attest. A study of British meth ods in Egypt is now already being made by several of our finest engineers, under the direction of the State Department at. Washington.
 in British hands the spade and plough share inevitably succeed the sabre and the rifle. The picture of the undaunted and abandoned Gordon holding his mud walled citadel in Khartoum in 1880, dying finally upon the savage spears of the Muliah's Arab horsemen. Is slowly but surely fading to give place to Sou- danese landscape of rose gardens and fields ripe for the harvest. Certainly the fairy tales of the future will be those created by that modern magfcian-the engineer: those engineers who now bold ly attack a continent and change the face of nature as moulded thousands i of years ago.