The Waipawa Mail Published Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Thursday, May 4th, 1911. THE BAGHDAD QUESTION.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXIX, Issue 5708, 4 May 1911, Page 2

The Waipawa Mail Published Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Thursday, May 4th, 1911. THE BAGHDAD QUESTION.

English writers have been giving prominence recently to the Baghdad question, and the average Englishman is just beginning to know where Baghdad is. Most of the great Turkish territory at the baok of Palestine is apparently not so very different from the centre of Australia to-day. But there was a time when it was actually the richest country in the world. Two big, brimming rivers happen to flow down the centre of it; and several thousand years ago, in the really progressive days, there was a network of canals irrigating this rather desolate part of Asiatic Turkey, and it was the seat of some of the greatest Empires the world has ever seen. In the less enlightened ages that have followed those works have decayed, the cities have been sacked and tumbled, and the marks of civilisation have been wiped off the face of the country like the writing off a slate. The project that is in hand to-day is, roughly speaking, to restore that oountry. Sir William Wilbocks, the engineer whose name is connected with the dam at Assouan, was brought in to plan some time sinoe, a vast Bcheme of irrigating and navigable canals, and the big London contractor, Sir John Jackson, undertook to carry out the works, estimated at £8,000,000, on the Euphrates Biver. There are to be two big barrage sohemes .on tributaries as well. Others works on the rivers Tigris and Diala will be undertaken later, but those on the Euphrates should be ready before many years. The first piece of land to be irrigated will be 000,000 acres, to be followed by another 600,000 on the Tigris. Of that country Baghdad is the metropolis, and from those faots it is likely in the future to draw a good part of its importance. But that is not really its importance at the present moment. Its present notoriety arises from the fact that it happens to be on the more or less direct route from the Mediterranean, on one side, to the Persian Gulf on the other; and that a German company some years back obtained a concession from the Turkish Government to build a railway not merely from the Mediterranean to Baghdad, but on from Baghdad to Basra, on the Persian Gulf, and to build a port at Basra ; and it is over this last half of the concession that the only friction has arisen. Basra, with the rest of the Persian Gulf, are very close to India, and they are just at the side of the British communications with India, Australia, and the East. By far the greater part of the trade and influence in that part of the world has so far been British, and the building of a German railway, with a German port at its head, into just that particular piece of coast, would made a great deal of difference to the strategical position of India. What is happening now is that the German company has agreed with Turkey to renounce its own right to build the line from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf on condition that it gets certain concessions elsewhere in return, and that when the line from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf is built, the German company shall be as large a shareholder in it as any Power exoept Turkey. Sir E. Grey has explained that, provided it is made certain that the port is purely commercial, and the lines are open to the goods of all nations without discrimination, Great

Britain will be perfectly satisfied. But the shares which she will demand in the Persian Gulf line, in order to make certain that it is purely commercial, is not yet known.