Palestine]
Emir, who, at the time of Burckhardt's visit, had not got the measure of the Jumblatts, put the Druses firmly under his heel, and became free to lord it over Lebanon as independently and arbitrarily as his ally, Abdullah Pasha, son of a Mameluke of Jezzar, was lording it over Palestine from his palace at Acre.
Hereditary System.—In the course of a century the mukatajis became hereditary in most localities of the mountain by a process which operates inevitably in feudal countries, however drastically the substitution of appointment for birth may have been effected in an earlier generation. In the rest of Syria also the same process was repeated again and again, the deeply ingrained feudalism of the population disposing it, after a short lapse of time, to accord freely to birth the fealty which their fathers had been forced to give to appointment. Owing to this instinct, itself due largely to survival of nomadic tribalism among settled Arabs, more feudal features exist in Syria at this day than in any other settled region of Turkey.
When the Egyptian invasion of Syria began in 1831, the country was still under an eighteenth-century regime, still entirely feudal, and still given over to Abdullahs and Beshirs. Mahmud II had been at work on Asia Minor for over a decade, breaking up its feudalism and converting it from a dependency of the Ottoman Empire indirectly administered, into an extension of the Imperial centre itself. He had intended to make himself master in his own house of Syria also, and his writing was already on the wall. But the Russian war of 1828 delayed the execution of his will; and, with peace hardly restored, Mehemet Ali of Egypt sent an army across the Sinai Desert, which, by excluding the Sultan from Syria for the rest of his term of life, postponed Imperial centralisation there to successors less able, less single-minded, and more beset by international tutors.
International Rivalry of Foreign Powers.—Before, however, we pass to the Egyptian invasion, a word should be said about that international rivalry for
