Palestine]
Empire, or fair to the Ottoman Sultan, to guarantee for ever such an infringement of his sovereignty as the autonomous State of the Lebanon. But we may still ask usefully whether it had any effect on the general economy of Syria so bad as to offset the benefit it conferred on a part. The honest answer is negative. On the debit side we have to set no more than some periodic unrest of Buka'a villages seeking, for the sake of political or economic advantage of the moment, to be reckoned on one side or the other of a frontier which was never delimited; the development of Beirut into a focus of European diplomatic intrigue and native separatism; and, perhaps, the annual emigration of four to five thousand Lebanese, unable to live well within the narrow bounds assigned to an autonomous State which should have included the Buka'a, and the westward slopes of Anti-Lebanon and Hermon, as well as the coast-line from Tyre to Tripoli. This last disadvantage, at any rate, has been compensated by the knowledge and capital brought home again by the emigrants after a few years in Europe or America. To credit, on the other hand, stands the capital fact that, two years after the final ratification of the Organic Statute in 1864, warfare ceased in Lebanon for fifty years. Maronites and Druses relapsed into peace, if not amity; and public security and standards of social and political life advanced to a point not nearly reached by any other province of the Ottoman Empire.
Lebanon has been a spoiled child of fortune. Thanks to its misdeeds, it has received, at the hands of aliens, liberties which it has done very little in its history to vindicate for itself. Even if Burton's gibe, that the Lebanese hide their weapons at the call of patriotism, be too bitter, it may be owned that they have turned their arms ninety-nine times in a hundred on one another, and have allowed Arabs, Turks, and Egyptians to ride roughshod over them, unopposed by any local patriotism worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with that of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Balkan races, or even that of their own Druse
