It may therefore be dismissed from our calculations that India stands in need of a railway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The political advantage, if advantage there be, would lie solely with Turkey, or with whatever power may eventually become master of Armenia and Kurdistan.
As a commercial speculation, the Euphrates railway scheme is, I believe, equally delusive. The additional cost and risk of transhipment would be an effectual bar to through traffic; while local traffic alone, would be insufficient to secure the financial success of the line. The Euphrates and Tigris valleys are often represented as rich agricultural districts, waiting only the hand of the immigrant to become again what they were in classic and even mediæval times. It is argued that if, in the twelfth century, the Euphrates valley boasted such towns as Rakka, Karkesia, and Balis, such towns may exist again, and that a railway carried by that route to Bagdad, would surely revive the ancient wealth of a naturally wealthy district. But such an argument speedily vanishes on an examination of the facts.
1st. The Euphrates and Tigris valleys neither are nor ever were rich agriculturally. As corn-growing districts they cannot compare with the hill country immediately north of them, with northern Syria, the Taurus, or Kurdistan. They lie out of the reach of the regular winter rains, which cling to the hills, and for this reason are almost entirely dependent on irrigation for their fertility. At best, the Euphrates and Tigris valleys, through which a railway would pass, are inconsiderable strips of good land, hemmed in closely by a barren desert, and incapable of lateral extension or development. They are isolated, and have long ceased to lie on the track of commerce. At the present day they contain no place of importance, with the exception of the pilgrim shrines of Kerbela and Meshhed Ali, and the decayed city of Bagdad, nor along the greater part of their extent, more than a few villages, depending for their subsistence on the date-palm. They are, moreover, subject to the caprices of their great unmanageable rivers, which at flood time wreck half the valleys. The Euphrates for 150 miles, passes without alluvial belt of any kind, through a quite inhospitable desert, while lower down it loses itself in marshes at least as valueless. The Tigris, from Mosul to Bagdad, boasts but three inconsiderable villages, and from Bagdad to Bussorah, a poor half dozen. The Montefik country on the lower Euphrates, and the island enclosed within the Hindiyeh Canal, are the only important corn-growing districts now existing.