After visiting the interior of Japan, China, Anam, Siam, Ceylon, India, Persia, Arabia, I found myself, in the evening of November 2, 1899, at Bagdad, Turkey, in close communion with our American consul, Rudolph Hurner, who had held that position from the United States to Mesopotamia for about thirty years. Bagdad is about 400 miles from the Persian gulf, and is now the largest Mesopotamian city of the old Babylonian empire, whose kings once caused the world to wince.

Mesopotamia, like the valley of the Yangtsekiang, is by nature very productive. Either, if properly cultivated, would supply rice sufficient to sustain the world, but here the outrageous taxes, together with the wild men of the desert scare away all enterprise, while in China the Yaw-men actually absorb the products of the soil through the imposition of exchange.

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