" PRO GRE S S " IN SYRIA.
1-To THE EDITOR OF TRH "SPECTATOR."]
Sra,—Having just returned from a long journey through Northern Syria, I was amazed to see a letter on " progress " in that unhappy country. Progress, if it exists at all, must be in the immediate neighbourhood of Beiriit alone. The country north of that city is literally blighted and blasted by Turkish tyranny and misrule, and all classes agreed in testifying that things are going from bad to worse. Vast tracts of what is one of the richest countries in the world lie entirely unfilled, or tenanted solely by wandering Tureomans and Bedouins ; and at the present moment, a ruthless conscription of boys and men, from fifteen or sixteen to fifty, leaves an insufficient popu- lation to cultivate the small portion of the land hitherto under tillage. The officials are unpaid, and taxes are exacted years in advance. The trade of the once-flourishing town of Ladikeyeh is dead. A road is projected from that place to llama, and perhaps to Horns. When I was there a few days since, 1 found the shops nearly all shut up, for the Turkish Governor had. driven out the whole shopkeeping population, irrespective of capability, age, or infirmity, to work on this road ; those even who offered to pay for able-bodied men as substitutes were not excused. Everywhere along "that lonely coast which once echoed with the world's debate," one saw relics of the grandeur and civilisation of successive peoples where now all is ruin. I forded scores of torrents and streams, dangerous or im- passable after rain, and across each saw the fragments of a Roman or even of an Arab bridge, but in no single instance a similar structure of Turkish times. The role of the Turk is to destroy, not to construct. Meanwhile, a Russian committee has been formed for propagandist purposes in Beirat, and I was assured on good authority that the Chief Dragoman of the British Consulate is a member of that body. Both France and Russia are fully alive to the paramount importance of Syria, to which England is so strangely blind and indifferent.—I am,
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