position than any of the fellaheen amongst whom they live, whether Christian or Moslem. The Christians are exempt from military service by virtue of their creed, besides enjoying the protection of the Church to which they belong, which, in its turn, is under the ægis either of France or Russia. The Moslems, though liable to conscription, are at any rate in religious sympathy with the Government, and are more or less favoured in consequence.
The Druses of Palestine have none of the privileges of the Christians or the advantages of the Moslems. They are regarded as a sort of pariah class, and despised as infidels by both. Hence they are robbed with impunity by their Moslem neighbours, oppressed without possibility of redress by the authorities, as being too unbelieving in matters of religion to be deserving of any one's sympathy; while their denial of the true faith does not protect them, as it does the Christians, from being called upon to serve as soldiers. The consequence is, that there is weeping and wailing every year in some eighteen or twenty villages which are in this exceptional position, when some of their young men are drafted off for service, which arises not merely from the grief of immediate separation, but from the anticipation of future trouble; for, in nine cases out of ten, not a year elapses before these recruits find opportunities of deserting, and seek their refuge in the Jebel Druse, where pursuit by the Turkish authorities is impossible. As infidels, they find existence in a Moslem army intolerable, especially when they can win their liberty so easily by escaping to their, co-religionists beyond the Haurun. Their desertion is the certain prelude to a visit by the zaptiehs to the village from which they were conscripted, and it thus becomes liable to a contribution, the amount of which depends more or less upon the good pleasure of the head of the police. The unhappy family to which the deserter belongs lives for the future under a constant financial pressure, thus dearly paying for the liberty which the defaulting member has purchased at their expense. It seems at first sight hard that the Druses of these few villages should not be put upon the same footing as the Christians, or their more fortunate kinsmen in the Hauran and Lebanon. But this would introduce a precedent which the Government very naturally refuses to establish, as it would apply equally to the Metawalies, the Ansaryii, the Ismailians, and other non-Moslem sects in the empire, which also are not Christian; and it would give rise to great dissatisfaction among the Moslems, who would refuse to see the expediency or justice of exempting infidels of this category from the conscription to which they were themselves liable. So great is the horror of military service among these people, that a few days ago a man who had just been drawn as a conscript came to me and offered to bind himself to my service for five years in any part of the world if I would purchase his discharge; and when, after satisfying myself as to the character of the man, I accepted his offer, his gratitude, and that of his family, was unbounded. This reluctance to serve is not because they are bad fighters – the experience of the Turks in their numerous conflicts with the Druses proves the contrary – but because they object to being specially selected by the officers to be placed in the front of battle, as having less valuable lives than the Moslems,
