Where the stream grows broad and clear. Yet, as the warm wind murmurs in the pine,

turesque though more honest retainer of the British firm of Cook.

From The Fortnightly Review. FRANCE AND SYRIA. THE able administrator who for the last In village life the same process may be twenty-two years has impartially executed observed. The people are fewer, the vilthe laws framed immediately after the lages even are less numerous. Many massacres of 1860 for the protected prov- which I found prosperous in 1872 are now ince of the Lebanon, has, only quite re- either deserted or half ruinous, and we cently, been dismissed from an office which never heard of a new settlement of Moshe had every right to regard as intended lem or even Christian natives. The cruel to be held during life; and Rustem Pasha war with Russia half ruined Palestine. leaves (for no very evident reason) the The flower of the male population was government of a country which has grown carried off to the Balkans, and the young rich and prosperous under his care. The sheikh of Gibeon (a place of perhaps five condition of the rest of Palestine and hundred souls) told me in 1881 that out of Syria is, on the other hand, miserable; twenty men taken from that one village he and those who have known the country was the only one who had returned alive. for the last ten years are able to judge Riding through the land I was more than how much it has declined from even the once offered a village with its lands for very modest degree of prosperity which sale, the peasants being no longer able to it formerly enjoyed. It is true that at pay the taxes or meet the demands of Beyrout and round Jerusalem many new usurers, Jewish, Greek, or Armenian, into houses have been built, while the Ameri- whose clutches they were falling, after can mission has spread not only through paying sixty to seventy per cent. for many Lebanon but into the districts immedi-years for money borrowed to pay the gov ately adjoining. It is true that the Jewish ernment. population of Jerusalem has increased The consequences of this misery are, enormously, and that the Jews of Hebron either that the population of a hamlet and Safed have also augmented their gradually dies out, the men being unable numbers and attained to greater influence; to marry, while illicit connections before! but these signs of progress, together with marriage are very rare among the Mosthe spread of German colonists from Jaffa lems, or else the elders of the village, with and Haifa to other towns, are not as en- the consent of the rest of the men, sell couraging as would at first be supposed. themselves and their lands into the hands The peasantry, who are the backbone of some capitalist, or of the usurer who of the population, have diminished most has lent most money to the community. sadly in numbers and in wealth. Ten The evil does not, however, stop here. years ago the village sheikh generally | A capitalist willing to spend money on rode a fair horse, and was not ill-dressed; the rich soil of the Sharon plains might now the tourist may travel for a whole day without meeting one of the native horsemen he used once to encounter; and those who have had to buy horses know how few remain in the country, and how the strong half-bred Arabs are now mostly in the hands of the contractors, who provide for the annual tourist army conducted by Mr. Cook, or some other enterprising organizer of travel. The Syrian dragoman, gorgeous in purple robes, as handsome a rascal as one could wish to meet, a capitalist working on his own account, is a thing of the past. He has disappeared before Western competitive prices, and is superseded by the humbler and less pic

no doubt reap a good interest by employing the native labor, and he might considerably better the physical and moral condition of his serfs by judicious liberality in bad seasons. The peasantry are neither lazy nor stupid, and when contented and happy they will do a good day's work and serve their master cheerfully. But they find it hard to forget the means whereby generally their new master has obtained possession of the land, and they certainly cherish the dim hope of one day regaining the ancient fee-simple which they have generally held since the Moslem conquest in the twelfth century, or possibly for many centuries before. The plains of

the schools in Lebanon, and even in Moab, which have been inaugurated by missionaries of that very Church which has been so persecuted at home in France, yet which is found so useful a political engine abroad; and in all cases where schools have been so assisted it is said to have been stipulated that French alone among foreign languages was to be taught, and that the learning of English should be discouraged.

Jaffa have now been bought up by capi. | Turkish regulations. It is said that many talists, some of whom are Jews, some thousands sterling have been spent by the Greek Christians, some Maronites from French republican government to assist Lebanon; but there is nothing more difficult in the lands ruled by the Porte than to establish a title to landed property. Theoretically any one who conforms to Turkish law has now the right to acquire property by purchase; practically a flaw is soon found by one official after the other, and each official either increases his own income at the purchaser's expense, or else involves the more scrupulous landowner, who refuses to pay an unending and ruinous baksheesh, in legal expenses which are almost equally ruinous, and which in turn entail other demands on the part of those who have the sale of the precious commodity of justice. Yet, although the peasant and the capitalist are thus in equally grievous plight, it must not be supposed that the Turkish government is any the better off. Taxes are paid, it is true, two or three times over by peasant and landlord; but the tax-collector refuses to disburse. There are cases in which an official defaulter has been tried and condemned, yet again reinstated in his office without paying what he owed the government, partly on account of a judicious distribution of bribes, and partly because his superiors knew that a new man might be more rapacious, because poorer, than the old offender.

Another circumstance which has aggravated the misery of the country is the not unnatural suspicion which has arisen in the sultan's mind regarding the designs of France, England, and Russia on his Syrian province. There can be no doubt that intrigue is rife throughout the country. The military attaché of the French Embassy at Constantinople who visited the Hauran in 1881, but who was so successfully escorted by the Turks as to be unable to enter into any relation with the Druzes or Moslems, was probably but one out of many offiicials, actively employed in intrigues directed against the sultan. The recent rebellion of the Druzes was thought to be fomented by foreigners. The Maronites have been more than once encouraged by the promise of French as sistance to gather and to protest against

Nor has Russia been less active in the Holy Land. Without counting certain surveys which are said to have been secretly executed in northern Syria, there is abundant evidence of the pious interest which the czar and his orthodox subjects are taking in the holy places of Jerusalem and Galilee. Almost the only new buildings in Nazareth are Russian chapels, and churches have sprung up- at Fuleh and Nain, at the newly discovered site of the meeting of Christ with Mary near Bethany, at the home of John the Baptist at Ain Karem, and elsewhere for which money has been found by the Russian head of the orthodox Church, or by the Roman Catholic cabinet at Paris. When, in 1881, the grand dukes came piously to pray for the soul of the late czarina at the Holy Sepulchre, it was thought necessary to parade five hundred Russian sailors marching in column through the Jerusalem streets; and in 1882 we saw a procession of a thousand French pilgrims in white cloaks, with banners and crosses, slowly pacing, with melodious hymns, down the narrow lane of David Street to the Crusading gateway of the Sepulchre Cathedral. Every year the number of Russian pilgrims, assisted by the Russian government, increases. They have been seen in armies of a thousand or more, mounted on donkeys, and escorted by the Russian consular staff through the country. It is well known that at Bethlehem a Roman Catholic congregation has lately been induced, by a subsidy, to become converted to the Greek Church, and that the property of this congregation will be confiscated if they relapse to their former

Syria will (as has been proved more than once) probably meet with courteous hospitality from the inhabitants of a Moslem village. It has been so since the days of Omar or of Saladin, and so it will be while a Moslem peasantry remain; but who shall say how soon the fellahin will become an extinct race if the present misery continues ?

faith. The Jesuit missionaries in Madeba | eller who loses his way at nightfall in of Moab have, on the other hand, converted and taken away half the Greek population at Kerak; and this has led to a visit from the Greek patriarch to this long-forgotten Christian colony. To say nothing of visits of many royal personages of all nations, or of the attachés and consuls who have of late found Syria so interesting a country for private tours, the activity of the Greek and Latin Churches, and the money openly spent in Syria by French and Russian agents, are sufficient indications of political activity.

When we turn to the larger cities, where many mosques remain with families in charge who trace back to the days of Saladin, and who claim to have been estab

many years were then of opinion, from the greater reserve of their manners, that they had something on their minds. The excitement and tall talk at Gaza and elsewhere, at the time when a wide rumor prevailed, according to which Arabi Pasha had taken the heads of the English commanders to Cairo and had driven the British army into the sea, showed the in

And what, it may be asked, is the atti-lished by Omar, we encounter, it is true, tude of Islam in face of this activity? another class, among whom fanaticism To answer the question we must first con- has a real existence. That the sultan's sider what is meant by a Moslem. The Pan-Islamite propaganda had been assid peasantry, who form the majority of the uously fomented among them just before supposed Sunnee Moslems, are in reality the Egyptian war can hardly be doubted. little better than pagans. As in Egypt | Those who had known this class well for the fellahah women still secretly visit the temple of Athor for the performance of ancient rites, and still worship the old gods of Egpyt, scarcely veiled under the modern names of Derwish saints, such as Seiyid el Bedawi; so in Palestine (as I have elsewhere endeavored to show in detail) it is the local worship of the old Canaanite divinities which survives in the veneration of Mukâms, named after Mos-terest felt by the class of the Ulemma, the lem heroes. There are but few of the country towns in which the minaret of a mosque is to be seen; there are few of the fellahin who can even recite the Fathah, or first chapter of the Koran. Religion in Syria, as in some other countries, The upper class in Egypt is a matter of class, and the peasant held the same views, and looked forward knows nothing of the questions which to the same future, but they failed to exOccupy the Moslem doctor. I have heard cite any true religious fervor among the the sultan the head of the faith - peasants who filled the trembling ranks openly cursed by Moslem peasants with- at Tell-el-Kebir. They might look with out a dissentient voice, and the fanatical disfavor on Frank interference, but they spirit, which Arabi Pasha vainly strove to have no real power to resist it. Pan-Isarouse in the breast of the Egyptian fella- lamism is but a dream, the futility of hin, is equally unnatural to the Syrian which was evidenced in Egypt, when ploughman. The Christian and the Mos- Indian Moslem soldiers, Egyptian peaslem live peacefully together in the East, ants, and the sheikhs of El Azhar were until the paid foreign agent comes to stir alike without religious sympathy. To exup their passions and to excite their pect the Sunnee to combine with the cupidity. The Damascus massacre of Shîáh, or even the Turkish Hanifeh, the 1860 would be found, were its history African Maleki, the Indian Shafi, the studied, to be no less of political origin | Arab Wahhebi, to combine heartily in the than the Bulgarian atrocities. The trav-cause of the faith, is as fruitless as to

Solhtas, and the Moslem gentry in the expected triumph of Islam and in the coming of the Mohdy. This excitement has fortunately been repressed, and it does not appear to have affected the peasantry.

In Jerusalem itself, three of these factions still divide the Moslem population. The Hoseini, in the middle of the town, are the most powerful; the Khaldi, occupy the east quarter; the despised Jauni abide among the Jews on the south. A Hoseini mother would rather see her daughter die unwedded than suffer her to take a Jauni husband. The same survival of faction I have traced in many other towns of Palestine, and the division of these Moslem parties, even in the petty villages, is almost as great as that which The policy of the Turk has been di- separates the Moslem from the Arab rected to the breaking up of all the native Christian, Latin, Greek, or Maronite. It power of Syria. The ancient families is by fostering such ancient enmities, and have been ruined or degraded; the rich | by playing the Druze against the Maronite,