The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-05-27
Garden of Eden Will Blos- som Again When the Irrigation Plans Are
 Worked Out
BUSREH ALREADY ONE OF THE ACTIVE
 CITIES OF ORIENT
Euphrates and Tigris Val leys Will Grow Every Kind of Crop, Even Cotton Be-
 ing a Great Industry
By CHARLES PENETRATION

London, May 15.-(Special Corre- spondence.)- e.)-Mesopotamia has not, like the road to Mandalay, been the theme of Kipling verse, but it is blessed coun- try and before it came under the iron heel of the Turk, and all the corrupt, stultify- ing influences for which the Turk stands, 1t flowed with the milk and honey of ma terial prosperity and gave to the world some of it's most delightful romances.
 When the British force began it's mem orable advance from Busreh. and until it won the pyrrhic victory of Ctesiphon, and afterwards, during Townshend's sor- rowful retreat to Kut-el-Amara, and his heroic resistance against the investing Turks. the eyes of the world looked with longing and desire on the land. It real ized all the possibilities which lay before 1t under sympathetic and generous regime-such as the British would be- and speculated on the immediate uses to which the government of India. as the representative of British sovereignty in that part of the world. you'd put it.
 Then Townshend, to save his heroic men from death, was compelled to accept the personal responsibility of surrender, and he, with his attenuated starved and disease stricken army of 10000 heroes was marched off in captivity. ''The land of progress has been stayed" was the verdict which rang out through the coun- ell halls of civilization, and the vista to which all of us had attached such great Importance seemed, for a few months, to sink beyond the horizon into the obscurity of an unknown future.
 We have done with that now, however Kut-el-Amara has been retrieved. Sir r.y hHaf British commanders whom the war has produced, has avenged Townshend, and. passing on to a greater objective, has captured from the fleeing and broken Ot- toman army of the east the flower of all the Sultan's eastern dominons-Ba gdad We have no time to ecstasize over the great accomplishment What has beer won has to be consolidated-as Busreh and all the country reaching up from the top of the Persian gulf has been consoli dated
 MESOPOTAMIA UNDER TURKS
 When I speak of consolidate how ever. do not refer to a military op- eration. I speak of the economic and commercial consolidation for that, to the rest of the world-and ultimately to Great Britain herself-will be far more important than the mere military triumph essential to the other though 1t was. To realize this we must review, shortly but carefully, the position of Mesopo- tamia under the Turks. Lower down, toward the Persian gulf, the land is a garden capable of great productiveness. Under just and capable administration 1t would have been a crime to have rlaced a limit on it's vast potentialities. Further away to the north and north west desert conditions prevailed, and if one-hundredth part of the enterprise which the British have shown in irrt- gating the grand sandy areas of the Punjab and Sind had been employed, the results in added areas under cul- tivaton, and the crops grown on them must have been stupendous. There was no reason, indeed, why all this great land should not have taken its place in the first rank of the food producing countries of the world. Pettifogging at tempts were made, of course, to provide water for the dry valleys and plains, but