ALTNEULAND

Organ of the Zionist Commission for the Exploration of Palestine

SYRIA AS A REGION FOR ECONOMY AND COLONIZATION.

That Syria is no longer a culturally primitive land is best recognized by the fact that its production has already been directed in high measure toward export; at least one may say of the districts near the coast that they work essentially for export, and if this is less strongly the case in the interior of Syria, it lies in the main in the fact that the costs of transport are often too great to permit the export of many articles of bulk from these districts. Every new line of communication, every new railway works a transformation herein, and as the Anatolian railway first opened the world market to Phrygian wheat, so will the railways now under construction in Syria shortly accomplish the same for the hinterland of Syria.

For the present Syria is still a purely agrarian land: on the coast and in the accessible and climatically favoured places of the interior an ideal region for garden cultivation, further toward the interior a grain country, and in the border districts toward the desert a land suited to stock-raising, especially of sheep and goats.