A LAND OF PROMISE.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 February 1918, Page 8

A LAND OF PROMISE.

_ - POSSIBILITIES OF PALESTINE. WORK FOR BRITISH RACE. Some interesting comments upon the present condition of Palestine and its wealth of promise are contained, in'a, letter received from a former member of The Post staff now serving with the Dritish forces in that region. "We have been up and down this country some time now,'' he 'writes. "The railway, which we last saw still Jon the- Belah side of the Wadi Ghuzi, is liow miles beyond Gaza itself, overlap.'ping the metre gauge Turkish military Jine, Great Camps have sprung up on the way, and the whole front has advanced solid from forty to fifty miles, the stuff comes up in all manner of .transport from rail through caterpillars, .notor-lorries, and cars, camels, G.S. wagons, down to the white asses of Biblical fame. Nothing could be busier than this great military high road: A NEGLECTED COUNTRY. "The country is not the Promised Land, but rather a land of promise. Our front line is in Judea, but this land of the Philistines consists of fertile orange groves behind the sand dunes which fringe the coast; then a vast brown upland plain, ivith low, lazy ridges of a sandstone formation, back on the horizon by the mountains, which constituted the barrier between the living land and the Dead Sea. In appearance it is not unlike the Murimotu Plains, round Ruapchu, or, I daresay, the treeless uplands of Central Otago; but the soil is extremely rich, running down as much as twenty feet in the wadis, or dry gullies cut by the winter rains. The rainy season will soon be on, and then the whole of the brown landscape will turn a tender green, to bo scorched again by the summer suns from April on. There is beautiful water in the village oases, and, I havt no doubt, ample artesian water, if only somebody would bore for jt. But you know the Turks—Kismet—ma'alish Oukra fate —never mind—tomorrow. It is for us to fulfil the promise of the land, and I hope much will be rcsened for the Anzacs, who have done to much to ,win it. USE AND POPULATE. "Yon know my theory of all these vast countries which constitute the Empire; we must use and populate or we forfeit. It is the law. We can rule this country for Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, or any or all of these mongrel Eastern races, but we must not be surprised if they (urn on us some day. We must populate, we must get our roots in Ihe soil, or we go before the weeds that grow only too readily. It's a tremendous task, 'but it's one that's worth (he fight, and worth the fight to come. The Germans saw the issue plainly enough; they saw the derelict Turkish Empire, and were in ostensibly as menders, but really as knackers, substituting their own architecture for the hollow Ottoman shell. It's up to us with our milder ways to take the job on, and, whatever befall, leave the mark of Britain among the marks of earlier civilisations. T should like to see men from all over the Empire settling here as in Egypt, only more so, in both places. The climate is excellent, quite as good .as Australia, and the present denizens mere villaire Bedouins, dwelling in mud huts. There's enough for all. THE rrjTURE IS NOW IN THE EAST. "I could tell you of many incidents of the advance, of recent air raids, wits bombs dropping all round our'.campsome within a radius of a mile or so—the other night, but I prefer to think of the political and social side of things after the war. People must be waked up to that. We have to face throughout the Empire a period of reconstruction, which will need in politics, in journalism, and education, something of a wider spirit lhau has ruled hitherto. Watch America stepping into the arena, and .Japan ever on the alert. We can't afford lo carry too many pounds overweight in (hose stakes. 'We'll be somewhere near top weight as it is. The future is a,, we make it, a-ud the future is now in the East. I'm studying Arabic as hard as I can myself."