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All the means are at hand for bringing the land to life the water, the engineer, the capital, the labour; only the Ottoman pretension stands in the way, and condemns the Sawâd to lie dead and unharvested so long as it endures. "The last voyage I made before coming to this country," wrote Sir William Willcocks at Bagdad in 1911, "was up the Nile, from Khartûm to the great equatorial lakes.
No doubt the American Government had been led to believe from the utterances of Willcocks in the Guardian, as the representative of the discontented element in Upper Canada, that they would find not only sympathy but probably some active co-operation in the western country as soon as the armies of the Republic appeared on Canadian soil and won, as they confidently expected, an easy victory over the small force which could be brought to check invasion and defend the province.
The force was scattered over a hundred and forty miles, and numerically only equal to the garrison they were going to relieve. The carriers were utterly insufficient for the transport. The newly-arrived troops, with Colonel Willcocks and his staff in front, rode out of the town on the morning of the 5th of June. A drizzling rain was falling, but this soon ceased and the sun broke out.
One of these grantees was the William Willcocks above mentioned, who was a man of much enterprise and philanthropy. He conceived the idea of obtaining a grant of a large tract of land, and of settling it with emigrants of his own choosing, with himself as a sort of feudal proprietor at their head.
Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir William Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his final conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at Bagdad in 1911 . "The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hectares.... All this land is capable of easy levelling and reclamation.
Colonel Willcocks now saw that the time was come to issue a proclamation promising, henceforward, to spare the lives of all rebels that surrendered. This was done, with the result that large numbers of the enemy came in. Almost all of them declared that they would have surrendered, long ago, had they not feared to do so. On October 6th, the Commandant and British Resident held a state levee.
It may be added that Sir William Willcocks proposes to control the Tigris floods by an escape into the Tharthâr depression, a great salt pan at the tail of Wadi Tharthâr, which lies 14 ft. below sea level and is 200 ft. lower than the flood-level of the Tigris some thirty-two miles away.
"That is all very well, Bullen, but I should recommend you to try your eloquence upon someone else. Perhaps you might find someone of a more self-sacrificing nature who would take the matter in hand." "Perhaps I might, but I rather fancy that I should not. The only man who could do it is Willcocks.
However, in course of time probably in the summer of 1797 he embarked with the full complement of emigrants for New York, whither they arrived after a long and stormy voyage. They pushed on without unnecessary delay, and in due coarse arrived at Oswego, where Mr. Willcocks received the disastrous intelligence that the Order in Council embodying his arrangement with the Government had been revoked.
Willcocks himself, various desirable measures of reform were advocated, and the dominant faction were from time to time referred to in opprobrious, but certainly not untruthful or unmerited language. The paper obtained a considerable circulation, and soon made its editor an object of bitter hatred on the part of the authorities.
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