CORRESPONDENCE.

THE LEVANT OF TO-DAY.

TN the East there are, thank God, things which never change.. The fullness of light, the perpetual, dramatic contrast of life and death, the sweep of the great coast-lines—every league of which round the Levant is historically famous—the shape of the palm, the shape of the camel, and the richness of colour- on human limbs and faces, can never be altered by any European aggressiveness. You are sure of them every time you go back to them. But this summer, on returning to the Levant after an absence of eleven years, my anticipation of these certain joys was a good deal less than my anxiety to learn what changes had happened among them. For the last eleven years have let loose upon the Nearer East some of the- greatest forces, both of peace and war. Egypt has been occn- pied by the British ; Jewish and German immigration into Syria has steadily increased ; Greeks and Latins have pursued their unholy traffic for the sacred sites ; the missions of Western Christendom have persevered ; their successes with the younger generation of natives have provoked the Eastern- Churches to a novel activity, and stirred up a zeal for educa- tion within Mahommedanism; and even the sit-still Turk has progress to show in his own queer fashion of keeping order- among the medley of civilisations so mysteriously committed to his charge. He site as still as ever, but his stick reaches farther round him than it used to do. A few notes of the effect of these changes, at least on the surface of life, may interest your readers.

With changes in the East, one takes for granted a British, graveyard. It is almost always so, and by the Levant as impressively as anywhere else. Come to Egypt by way of the

and the first sign you get of the immense revolution in the Valley of the Nile is the little cemetery hard by Tel-el- Kebir, where they laid our officers and men who fell on that field. The walls of the English Church at Cairo, which, eleven years ago, I remember to have felt very bare, are covered now with memorial marbles and brasses. Gordon's is, of course, eminent among them, and more frequent than all the crowned heads of Europe that adorn the walls of hotels and cafes are prints of his clear English face. These recent graves lead me to speak of the older and far larger British tribute which lies scattered all round the Levant from Alexandria to Scutari, and which seems to me far more striking than even the stupendous Roman and Greek cemeteries on the borders of the Arabian desert. It lies not. only in the thronged military graves of the cemeteries towards the Bay of Aboukir and by the side of Florence Nightingale's hospital on the Bosphorus, but, still more pathetically, under solitary tombstones with English names and English ranks, which you stumble upon, crumbling and defaced, in the out- skirts of so fanatically Moslem a town as Acre, or in the Christian graveyards of Cyprus. Some of the dates are astonishingly early—in Larnaca, for instance, 1689, 1710,. 1739—but most are about the beginning of this century, or more recent still. There is a significant progress evident in. the inscriptions. First, consuls, traders, agents of companies, soldiers, sailors, and (but not till the beginning of this. century) century) missionaries—all these earliest tombs are of men only. And then, within the last forty years, you trace their inevit- able consequences—stones with sweet English names of women and children. If the missionary himself was by no means the pioneer of the British invasion, it was clearly he who first took his family with him, and sought to found a home in these dangerous climates where doctors are so few and summers so.

-fierce. On the coasts of the Levant, there is hardly a Christian cemetery without the names of English or American clergy- men's wives and children. One is sometimes surprised, too, by the strange bed-fellows which travel and research have given to the Eastern dead. I came upon Buckle's grave in the cemetery outside the eastern gate of Damascus,—the author of the "History of Civilisation" laid to rest on civilisation's utmost border. No wonder the Frenchman said : -"How you English leave your dead about the world !"

To return to the British occupation of Egypt. It was interesting to note that it has not failed to impress the imaginations of the tribes, settled and unsettled, of Syria. In the Syrian cities, there is quite a brisk trade done in European • oleographs and cheap coloured prints; and none of these are more popular among the natives, or further spread through the land, than certain gorgeous views of the battles of Tel-el- Kebir and El-Teb. We found these illustrations of British power the only works of art in villages to the east of the -Jordan ; and I discovered that one of the stock arguments which our dragoman and muleteers used upon sceptical Bedouins in the same districts, was the beating Britain gave three times over to the Arabs of the Soudan.

A cynic might say that, next to the increase of graves, the increase of grog-shops was the most notable effect of the British occupation of Egypt ; and at its centre, in Cairo, grog-shops have, indeed, very much increased. But it would not be fair to impute them all to our soldiers. In some parts of Egypt, and throughout Syria, I was told that drinking and drunkenness have very much increased, apart altogether from Frankish example or encouragement. In Palestine every year more arak, a strong spirit distilled from raisins, is drank, mainly by Christians, bit also by Mahommedans. In Nazareth, with a population of 6,500, there was only one drinkshop eleven years ago : there are now seventeen. On my former journey, I do not remember to have seen one drunk native, but this time I saw many.

Cairo is much changed. The British occupation has enhanced rather than marred its picturesqueness. A further piquancy is lent to the varied crowds by the presence among them of the scarlet tunics of her Majesty's uniform with the names of English shires upon them : shoulders marked " Dor.

• setshire " and " Shropshire" jostling with white-robed Moors from Tunis and the " abbas " of Malays, come to study at the great Mahommedan University of El-Azhar. But otherwise Cairo has changed for the worse, if the worse be the less picturesque. The vulgar Frank has become rampant. It is not in the buildings on the outskirts—suburbs of villas and mansions of flats—for their gardens keep them oriental. But great Greek shops and French shops, with Western haber- dashery and ready-made clothing, the prices marked large on glaring cards, have broken out in the centre of the city and upon the venerable Mooskee itself. This street, whose surface used to be watered and trampled by feet of men and beasts into a smooth, elastic, silent thoroughfare, is now macadamised and noisy. There are many more tall chimneys. Cairo is fast losing the two notes of an Eastern city, which Damascus still happily retains, smokelessness and noiselessness. In conse- quence, too, of straighter house-walls, wanting projections, the cool shadows, shot by shafts of light, are disappearing, giving way to glaring places with arcades round them. But plunge into the Side bazaars and you find to your joy the gloom, the long dark vistas, the gleams of colour, the turbaned, white-robed merchants cross-legged on their tables, and the odours of spices.

In the undoubted success of British organisation in Egypt there exists one great defect,—the more glaring that it seems so easy to remedy it now, and that it will certainly be im- possible to remedy it a few years hence,—the Government do not keep the peasants' hands off the ancient monuments. So injurious is their neglect, that this winter, when Mr. Flinders Petrie had laboriously excavated the Temple of Senefru, the oldest building in the world, he must needs fill all the rubbish in again and cover up the place, which otherwise would have been used as a quarry for the neighbouring villages. If it is want of money that prevents the authorities from fulfilling their duty to history and science, why do they not double the present tax upon tourists ? Surely no visitor to the Valley of the Nile would object to pay £2, instead of El, for the proper custody of the tombs and temples. It s one of the glories of the French occupation of the

Delta, nearly a century ago, that science owes to it the beginnings of Egyptology : it would be an equal glory of British connection with the land, if once for all our authori- ties arrested the ruin of those ancient monuments, which the climate would never spoil, if only barbarous men's hands were kept away.

As long as the Turk holds Syria, the appearance in her of things Western will necessarily be slower than in Egypt. But even in Syria the last ten years have wrought conspicuous changes. On our first morning in Jaffa we were wakened by the screech of a railway-whistle : there is an electric-light just outside the Damascus Gate at Jerusalem : the shadow of a telegraph-post falls upon Jacob's Well, near Sychar : and a steam-mill puffs day and night hard by the ancient well of Nazareth. They are getting on with the permanent-way of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad—only the have to rebuild parts of it so often that it can hardly be called permanent yet. It is open as far as Ramleh for goods, it crosses Sharon and passes up the broad Vale of Sorek, by Zorah, Eshtaol, and the Camp of Dan, Samson's birthplace, and up the way the kine of Bethshemesh brought the ark from Ekron. It will come in upon Jerusalem across the plain to the south-west of the city—with the least possible intrusion, one is glad to observe, on the sacred associations of the district.

For the ends of government and commerce a very much more important railway will be that for which concession has been granted from Haifa to the Hauran and Damascus. It will follow an immemorial highway across the plain of Esdraelon, the Upper Jordan, and the country to the south of Hermon—the most fertile districts of Syria. It will bring Damascus and the desert traffic into close connection with the sea, but its chief result will be the opening-up of the Hauran- that enormous wheatfield which stretches south from Hermon some sixty miles by some thirty broad. One has no idea of the traffic of this district till one visits the place : but it was harvest-time when we were in the Hauran, and no day passed without our meeting hundreds of camels laden with wheat for the Damascus market. On an evening while I eat for an hour and a half at our tent door at Ghabaghib, the first station out of Damascus, I counted 187 camels pass with their loads. Last year the Hauran farmers had no market for half their wheat, much of which was left on the fields,—and this though they do not sow all their lands every year, but leave every piece fallow for one year out of three. A railway into the Hauran will find large harvests waiting for export, and a numerous and pros- perous population, much above the average of Syrians, able to pay for considerable imports. As it is, their oil, their iron, their wood, and fruit (for there are no trees on the Hauran), and many of the other necessaries of life, are brought from a distance. In fact, there is no sign of change more ominous in Syria than this new railway, one of whose termini will be under the shadow of Carmel, and the other by the Gates of Damascus, whose whistle will be heard in Nazareth and on the shores of Galilee, and whose bridges will be flung over the Kishon, the Jordan, and the Pharpar. Otherwise, as far as commerce is concerned, there are only evident in Syria the symptoms which follow an increasing and more secure popu- lation, and a very much larger annual invasion of touristsi Eleven years ago, the plain of Esdraelon was cultivated in small patches, the fruits of which were frequently swept off

by Bedouin from the East of Jordan. Now Esdraelon is one almost unbroken sea of wheat. It belongs, alas ! no more to its natives, but to a wealthy Greek of Beyrout, whose "model villages" and farmsteads are novel features in the scenery. There is everywhere a considerable increase in vine-growing and the manufacture of wine, with real success at least in the

Lebanon, where both the Jesuits and a French firm (at Shtora, between the Lebanons) have turned the landscape into a re-

flection of a lower Swiss Canton, and produce a very tolerable claret. Hotels have quadrupled. Frankish cottons and iron- mongery, but especially Frankish boots and shoes, have enor- mously increased. It is a singular fact that, in his borrowing of our clothes, an Oriental invariably begins with the shoes. The transformation of an Eastern to a Western is ever from

the feet up, and his head-gear the last that he parts with; whereas, for obvious reasons, the head-gear is generally the first part of Oriental costume we are tempted to adopt.

One commercial change is oddly obtrusive in Syria, and stares you in the face from every village. Eleven years ago

American oil had displaced the native vegetable oils and their feeble light. You found the familiar petroleum-cask from Penn- sylvania, with its blue ends and black lettering, in the Jordan valley and hundreds of miles up the Nile. But to-day the fellahin and the shopmen of the rural bazaars knock up their rude shelves from wooden cases stamped " Batoum Trading Company," and the square tins in which the oil is carried from the Caspian are used by the shepherds of Judwa in place of the goatskin buckets to water their flocks. These tins serve innumerable purposes besides. On the East of the Jordan we found every domestic vessel made out of them, doors plated and huts roofed with them ; and in the Hauran and at Rabbath-Ammon little schoolboys using them with ink, as slates to do their sums. All this must mean a very considerable increase to Russian traffic with Palestine. The oil is cheaper than the American, but not so effective.

In the settlement of foreigners in Syria I found a very evident increase. You tell a foreigner in the Holy Land by his roof ; where a roof slopes and is of red tiles, there lives a Frank. Now these red roofs have broken out all over land- scapes where, ten years ago, I remember to have seen few or none. Of course they patch the green orange-groves of Jaffa, and cluster in suburbs round Jerusalem. The suburbs of Jerusalem are surprising ; I was quite unprepared for the largeness of the southern, where German and American Adventists have settled. But away, too, in the rural districts, the red roofs break the dirty-white flat surfaces of the villages, and lend, whether to the bare limestone landscapes of Judwa or to the green of Carmel, a charming relief. The sight of them has a strange welcome for the Western traveller ; not only their colour, but their slope, their arched slope, implies a com- fortable interior, and bespeaks a home impossible under the porous platforms of the native houses, which are so often a refuge from the damp and heat of the rooms beneath.

The new immigrants to Palestine are mostly Germans and Jews. I had no means of judging the number of the German population, but their colonies have extended and decidedly improved. It is well known that they belong for the most part to that set of Adventists, who believe that Christ will take personal possession of the Holy Land, when it is prepared for him by his people. But unlike other Christians, who strive to hasten their Lord's Kingdom by the conversion of the natives, these industrious and eminently pious Germans con- fine themselves to cultivating the soil. They do not believe in ordinary Christian missions, and make no attempt to proselytise. "What religious advice do you give to the Mahommedans?" I asked a pastor. "We tell them to be good Mahommedans." The German colonists are not separated from the Fatherland. One of the most interesting touches in that medley of nationalities which modern Palestine contains was a little German Government vessel in the Bay of Acre, come to carry back the annual batch of recruits for their period of service.

The increase of Jews in Palestine is, of course, very marked, and especially so in Jerusalem. Eleven years ago the whole population of Jerusalem. was not more than 25,000. Now it must be nearly 50,000, of whom about 30,000 are Israelites. So that if cities be determined by the majority of their inhabi- tants, Jerusalem is at last again a Jewish city. The same proportion bears in other towns. At least half of the 25,000 people in Safed are Jews, and in Tiberias they number 3,000 out of 4,000—but on Hebron only some 500 out of 8,000. They have seventy synagogues, and in Jerusalem several large hospitals and schools. Their agricultural colonies, the real test of Jewish progress in Palestine, have increased in number, and in apparent efficiency. There is a great red-roofed village on the Waters of Merom, and a few miles from it a large estate given by Rothschild and cultivated by Jews. Elsewhere, and especially near Jaffa, new settlements have been just founded or are in process of building. At our hotel in Damascus there were about half-a-dozen Jews who had come to buy land, but before we left we heard that orders had come from Constantinople that no land be sold to Jews. On our journey down the East of the Jordan, we met several times a party of Jews surveying land. I did not visit any purely Jewish colony, and the accounts I got of their pro- gress were conflicting. Residents in Palestine do not yet believe in the capacity of the Jew for agricultural work, though it would evidently be unfair to decide this for a generation or two. You cannot change the habits of men,

who, and whose fathers for centuries, have been publicans, bankers, and middlemen, by merely settling them on good soil and putting spades into their hands. At Rothschild's settle- ments in Galilee, the Jews are generally found lying in the shade, while the ordinary fellahin, whom they have paid, da the cultivation. I paid a visit at Artuf, in Samson's country, to the agricultural colony of the Jewish Refugee Aid Society,. an English corporation. The colony is under the direction of an Anglican missionary at Jerusalem, and is managed by a Christian Jew. It was founded eight years ago for persecuted Jews from Russia and Roumania and bought land here, which, having much risen in value, forms, I understand, the colony's chief commercial success. The manager had no bright tale to tell. The method is to support Jews on the settlement for a year or two, teaching them trades or agriculture. At the end of that time, those who wish to continue as cultivators. have land given to them. But few families remain, and the- only sign of progress about the place which I saw, was the building of a stone barrack instead of a wooden one. Artuf is a splendid site, and upon the line of the new railway.

On the whole, the Jewish position and prospects in Palestine are these. In a time more favourable than any before, as far- as the political conditions in Europe and the wealth and wil- lingness of Jewish patriots are concerned, the increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine has been very rapid. But it has aroused the suspicion of the Turk, who is trying to- check it : it is largely confined to Jerusalem, and does not much affect the rural districts, the power to deal with which) must, after all, be the real test of Israel's success in re-peopling the Holy Land. Those who anticipate a speedy literal fulfil- ment of their favourite prophecies of the Return of the Jews have to reckon with the fact that, under the most favourable conditions, there are in Syria not more than 70,000 Jews out of a population of 2,000,000, and that, with some years of experience of Jewish colonies in the Holy Land, the great Jewish philanthropists have at last resolved to direct to the New World their huge effort for transporting their country- men. If the agricultural settlements of the Rothschilds and the Alliance Israelite in Palestine had been successful, it is- not likely that Baron Hirsch's great scheme would have- turned from it to the West. Of course, it may be replied that 70,000 Jews may in twenty years have virtually the- management of the whole land in their hands, and that, as for their development into agriculturists, the prophecies did, not contemplate anything more than their possession of the country, while "the sons of the alien were to be their plough- men and vinedressers."

Religious activity has very much increased in Palestine, but not always along its proper lines. On this visit, nothing has surprised me more than the great increase of ecclesiastical buildings. Every one knows that for many centuries Greeks and Latins have struggled for the possession of the holy places ; but in the last ten years this straggle seems to have- been pursued with an unscrupulousness and vulgarity, which have defaced some of the most beautiful scenes in the land, and built high before Mahommedans enduring monuments of Christian jealousies. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impudence of the operations,—their defiance of history, of common-sense, of the well-founded ridicule of the infidel. Where one Church has secured the traditional site for- which both may have been competing, the other imme- diately transfers the tradition to a neighbouring spot, and begins his building very soon after that of his rival. The hostile sanctuaries are often as near and as aggressive as the rival booths in a village fair. The spectacle which for centuries. has disgraced the Christian name in the Grotto of Bethlehem,. the separate denominational chapels of the Nativity, is now- repeated in the face of the sun on the scene of our Lord's Agony. The Franciscans walled in their Gethsemane some- years ago ; but now above it, separated only by a narrow lane, rises a new garish, ghastly pile of white stone walls and pinnacles called "the Greek Gethsemane." They may charge- Protestant sects with "religious shop-keeping," but this kind of religious show-keeping is, in truth, far worse. It has spoiled within the last ten years the dearest side of Olivet ; it threatens Bethany, and one cannot tell how soon it may break out on the shores of Galilee. To remember what Olivet was,. and to sea it now, is heart-breaking. If this sort of thing goes on it will fast become impossible to realise that there ever was a garden or an olive on the Mount. But in their proper activities there is little except praise to bestow on all the churches. I have heard Anglican mis- sionaries, of an Evangelical society, pay a warm tribute to the educational missions of the Church of Rome—both those of the Franciscans and those of the Jesuits. The large boys' and girls' boarding-schools and orphanages, which one meets with in Jerusalem and Damascus out for their evening walk with a nun or a priest at their head, tell the same tale. In the Maronite country, where Lebanon looks down on the sea, you meet so many Jesuit Fathers and so many Maronite priests educated in Rome, that Juvenal's line seems reversed, and the Tiber to be flowing into the Orontes. The Jesuits give a thoroughly good tducation. Of Protestant education I saw a great deal, from village schools in Lebanon and the East of the Jordan, to the medical doctors, pastors, and teachers turned out by the American College at Beyrout. With the wisdom of Abraham and Lot, Anglicans and Presby- terians many years ago divided the land between them, the English Church keeping to the Holy Land proper and the American Presbyterians occupying North Syria. There is an undenominational organisation which works with the Presby- terians in their district and with the Anglicans in theirs— the British Syrian Schools Mission. It is almost solely managed by women, on whose devoted and successful work too high praise cannot be bestowed. All these and other foreigners have provoked the Greek Church to like works ; and perhaps the most pleasing sign of change I found in Palestine was the awakening of this Church to her educa- tional responsibilities. As signs of this, I need only mention that in Damascus the Patriarch started evening schools for young artisans and boys at work, and took great personal trouble with Saturday evening meetings of young men for debating religious subjects. The Mahommedans, as it may be imagined, are not resting where Christians are so bard at work, and there is a lively and universal competition through- out the land for the rising generation. In fact, next to the first-class European States, I do not suppose that there is any country where the opportunities of education, from the elements up to sufficient training for the medical and teaching professions, are more widespread or effective. The American College at Beyrout, with its medical side and its arts side, and with its magnificent Press, is the crown of the whole, and a centre of light and leading for all the Levant.

One of the most striking things in Palestine is the number of young men, from three to eight years' standing, whom you meet with on all sides of missionary work, but chiefly upon the medical. This is the mission-work that tells; and after seeing it in connection with the Church of Scotland Mission in Smyrna, the Edinburgh Medical Mission in Damascus, and the Free Church of Scotland Mission at Tiberias, I wonder that any mission can afford to live without it, and that those churches which have it do not support it more generally. In doctorless land like Syria, five or six medical missionaries are certain to be overworked. Scarcely one of them has a proper hospital at his disposal, most of them are without even trained nurses, and sixty cases, some of them requiring serious operations, often fall in a single day to the lonely, unfurnished practitioner. If the Societies are not able to send two men to every post where they now send one, surely medical students who have just qualified would be glad, for the payment of their expenses, to assist for a year or two in work in which the number, especially of surgical cases, is so large and so varied. In six months at a medical missionary's side in Syria, a young doctor will see more than he can see in ten years. in an ordinary practice at home.

I must conclude these notes by a few remarks on the political changes in Syria. The most striking of all is the increased governing power of the Turk. Everybody bears witness to this. It is most evident to the east of the Jordan, where, indeed, it compares most favourably with the Turkish Government in the neighbourhood of Constantinople. In Turkey in Europe the Sultan cannot stop brigandage. East of the Jordan, he does. In the train by which we travelled home from Constantinople, a whole company of infantry accompanied us as a guard ; but our little caravan marched twenty-two days from Damascus to Jeru- salem through the Haman, Gilead, and Moab, in perfect safety, with only one soldier as an escort. The change has happened during the last ten years. The Turk has gradually brought the Bedouin under his power. The Plain

of Esdraelon used to be periodically ravaged ; it is now per- fectly safe. The villagers to the north-cast of Damascus lost their goats every year or two, and families were often beggared; but this has not occurred for some years. There is a Turkish Kaimakam in Tadmor. The Druzes are kept better in hand during the last five years, especially outside the Lejjah. The chief of the Beni-Adwan tribe, on the north of Moab, who a few years ago was the sworn foe of the Turk, is now their subsidised official. In most of the other Bedouin tribes the Government has planted a katib or scribe, ostensibly for the purpose of teaching the tribesmen their religion, but really as a political agent. Every inducement is made to get the nomads to settle down to agriculture, and some of them, like the Ta'amire, to the west of the Dead Sea, are gradually becoming fellahin. The same policy of setting nation against nation, which proved so successful in the Lebanon, is being practised along the borders of the Desert. Colonies of Circassians have been planted where the Bedouin are most troublesome, and Bedouin and Circassians keep each other in order. For two nights we camped among the Circassians at Gerash and at Rabbath-Ammon. We saw none of their boasted beauties, though many of the women went unveiled ; but, on the contrary, were impressed with the cruel " dour " look of both men and children. For the two days we were among them we saw only one man smile, and cruelty and relentlessness are the character they bear among all their neighbours. They have improved the agriculture of the dis- tricts where they are settled, and introduced wheeled carts. But they are pulling to pieces the magnificent ruins close by the sites of their villages. Gerash, the ancient Gerasa, has at present a street with 310 columns, a forum, two amphitheatres, several temples, and a vast extent of other remains ; but if the Circassians continue as they have done, in ten years there will be little left but heaps of stones. The Circassian influence is strong in Constantinople, where most of the Pashas have Circassian mothers, and it was this, coupled with the motives of policy described above, that secured their settlement in some of the most fertile parts of Syria.

The clever policy and strong authority, which seem so admirable among the semi-savage races on the desert border, are deplorable in the Lebanon, where commerce and agricul- ture have so flourished during the last few years, and educa- tion progressed by leaps and bounds. It is not a country, it is not a people to be in the bands of the Turks. But as fifty years ago, and as twenty years ago, so now there is no nationality, and no public spirit in the Lebanon. In that mountainous district, which the Turks have never really con- quered, and where the old Christian blood has preserved its energy through centuries, there is no cohesion among the people. All are bitterly divided by religion or by race. Nor is there any great family left, like the princely clans of thirty years back ; nor is there any great individuality. By ten years ago the Turks had destroyed or scattered the leading families alike of Druses, Christians, and Moslems ; and nowa- day there is no man in the Lebanon who is known ten miles from home. Therefore, in spite of the energy, which profitably cultivates most barren districts of the Mountain, in spite of the commercial capacity which distinguishes all Syrians, and

in spite of the fact that two out of every five young men are as well educated as the average European, they have no enthusiasm or hope for themselves. It is not independence they talk of, but possession by one of the great European Powers. And from this sparsely populated country the best of them are steadily emigrating to America and Australia. In some high villages in the Lebanon, New York, Brisbane, and Melbourne are almost as familiar names as they are in