Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/25

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PREFACE
xvii

lifted by the forces of invention, steam power, and individual initiative, so all the world was to rise in like manner and measure. When in our long rides over the mountains which rim Mesopotamia north and east, whose valleys feed its boundary rivers, boy-like, I brought him a split pebble of malachite, the rhomb of carbonate of iron, the shining black cubes of galena, the short staple of a cotton boll borne breast high as we camped by a rushing stream, and he worked out its possible water power, or I took lessons at a village loom he was prophesying the economic expansion to come. I do no despite to his flaming zeal for souls when I record that I never saw his face beam as when he taught one of his converts how to make sulphuric acid with the unmined sulphur deposit of Mosul, and the man improved on the process in Ure's Dictionary, that compend of fifty years ago.

The copper and the lead, he pointed out to me, the oil which rainbowed some streams on what is now the edge of the Kerkuk oil fields, are still undeveloped. This convert's tiny plant was stopped because it might lead to the easier making of explosives. But the good man's two sons are thriving business men not in Mosul opposite Nineveh, but in Providence, Rhode