conquest. It was not a return to the old order; for formerly feudal chiefs had had the power to stop all rapine but their own. Now there was no restraint but that of an immature Turkish administration, relying upon such tatterdemalion forces as Rey remarked sheltering in the ruins of Lebanese palaces in 1857.
Massacre of 1860.—Nor did the successful issue of the war bring any gain to Turkey. It only increased the French weight upon her back, and led to the reiteration of the Hatti Humayun, promising Christians and Jews the same rights as Moslems. The Druses saw the Maronites about to be exalted in their room; the fanatic faithful of Damascus believed that a worse than Egyptian regime impended over their heads. The result was the year 1860, in famous for all time in the annals of Syria. The reports of two Commissions working at cross-purposes, the rivalry of two Powers united in the primary object of securing atonement for atrocities and precluding their repetition, but divided, secretive, and suspicious in all other respects, finally, much mutual defamation ever since, have rendered hopelessly obscure the history of that and the following year. We can be sure only of the situation which was brought about.
Constitution of Autonomous Lebanon.—It would be useless, even were it in place, to ask now who was responsible, or in what measure, for those massacres of sixty years ago, or with what precise motives foreign intervention was planned, carried out, and crowned by the constitution of an autonomous Lebanon under a Christian mushir, who, in practice, would always be a Catholic. Certainly, if Lebanon alone had but added another to its series of internecine tumults, even at a cost of 5,000 lives, there would have been no mandate of Europe and no Organic Statute. It was not the Lebanon events, but the Damascus massacre, interpreted as a symptom of infectious fanaticism, that overcame the reluctance of Great Britain to commission Louis Napoleon. It is equally useless to enquire now whether it was wise, in the general interest of the Ottoman
