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No. 7. | Vienna, 14th February 1902. | 6th Year

The Railways of Palestine and their Connection with the Traffic of the World.

"Our age stands under the sign of traffic." This pregnant saying of the Emperor ever rings in one's ears whenever one comes to speak of the development of a country in respect of its railways. The snorting iron horse, that emblem of a democratic age, has taken possession of our social life and become an integral part of the history of our times. We are no longer able even to picture our social existence without railways, whether they be fired with coal or oil or even driven by electricity. Of all the inventions of the reform-rich nineteenth century of the Christian era, none has struck home like that of the two Stephensons, father and son. An old-fashioned political economist would have judged the stage of culture of a country by the quantity of soap it consumed. One may far better take the number and length of railway lines as a means of comparing the civilisation of modern states one with another.

In such a comparison, where only what exists, what is and what is real, is a determining factor, Palestine would fare badly. For the Promised Land is at present as poorly connected by rail as it might well be connected. It has an isolated railway system without any connection whatever, and therefore without any prospect even of material advantages. For of railways the same holds true as of rivers: the little brook can scarcely bear the light wooden skiff, while the great stream carries iron ships upon its back. And it is no wonder that Palestine at present possesses so few and for the most part such unremunerative lines, when one considers how thinly it is now peopled. A glance at the map of Palestine suffices to show that the Promised Land, if Constantinople, in the late-Caesarist view, deserves to be the head of the universe, ought to be the heart of the world, into which all veins and arteries flow. But the veins of a country are its roads and ways and, to speak in modern terms, its railway tracks. Palestine has always formed, and forms to-day, a point of intersection; it lies between three continents: on Asiatic soil, near the Suez Canal and not far from all the civilised states of Europe. In ancient and mediaeval history the Holy Land, by reason of its excellent situation, was the most fiercely contested territory, the veritable apple of discord, whose possession was decided not by the lying aesthetics of a Paris but by the rude force of the sword.

Palestine, from the Hebrew P'leschet (Philistaea), which comprised the territory south of Jaffa, was extended as a geographical conception — not a political one — to the whole country from Rama and Dan (34 deg. 15 min. N. lat.) in the north to Beersheba (Bir es Sebaa, 31 deg. 15 min. N. lat.) in the south, the river Amon (Wadi el Mondschib: 36 deg. E. long. of Greenwich) in the east, and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. The greatest length of Palestine is 230 km, its greatest breadth in the south 133 km, in the north 60 to 70 km, and its whole area about 26,000 km² (470 square miles). According to the latest estimates some 700,000 persons now dwell in Palestine — 75 per cent. of them Mohammedans — so that 28 persons fall to each square kilometre. Natural boundaries divide Palestine into four parts: 1. the plain by the sea, from Mount Carmel in the north to Gerar in the south, 165 km in length and 15 km in breadth; 2. the West-Jordan plateau, with the great road from Hebron by way of Jerusalem to Shechem; 3. the Jordan valley (El Ghor); and 4. the East-Jordan highlands, with the rich cornfield of Bashan.

The ancient East Indian trade route led through a part of Palestine, and for several centuries the Promised Land formed an emporium for the gold and colonial wares that came from the land of Ophir. Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand de Lesseps shifted the East Indian artery of traffic, and now it is being displaced anew by the German Bagdad Railway. Palestine can only profit by the nearness of the world's railways and sea-routes. The laying of rails through Asia Minor, the converging of the railways of the world upon the Bosphorus, and the colonising attachment of the Turks to Europe signify for the Promised Land an awakening from its sleep of many centuries, a rousing from the alluring dolce far niente. Palestine, the Promised Land of antiquity, may also become the promised land of the very newest age, because it is framed by modern means of communication and only the connecting lines remain to be built. In the south lies the grandiose Suez Canal, of which it is rightly said that it has altered the geography of the world and "God's