cousins in the Hauran. The measure of their happiness is their lack of history down to the outbreak of the recent war. Indeed, their danger, as time went on, lay in the uncompromising attitude of the Powers towards the charter of the Lebanon. Suspicious of one another, and unwilling to give the Porte any opening, they tried to prevent any change, even the most plainly desirable, in the Constitution they had made; and such slight beneficial modifications as were, indeed, introduced, e.g., in 1868 or 1892, were accepted only on protest as accomplished facts.
Organization of the Rest of Syria.—On the rest of Syria the settlement of the Lebanon had, on the whole, a good effect. It is no mere coincidence that the Ottoman Law of the Vilayets is dated 1864. The able Ministers of the half-crazy Abdul Aziz feared that more Lebanons would be constituted, unless their master's house were set in some sort of order. The attention of the world was being called to the south-eastern Levant by the construction of the Suez Canal. Napoleon III, who, in 1861, had commissioned Gifford Palgrave to go down from Damascus into the Arabian peninsula, was known to cherish far-reaching plans for the Arab lands. High-placed Europeans began to appear at the Holy Places. The future Kaiser, Frederick, came to Jerusalem in 1869; and the Empress Eugénie planned a pilgrimage in the same year, but did not make it. Russia, in spite of her Crimean defeat, was increasing her solicitude for the Holy City, having acquired a large tract of building land just outside it in 1856. The annual tale of Russian pilgrims, formerly a few hundreds, had become, by 1870, a matter of thousands, while since 1847 the growing influx of Russian Jews had been causing uneasiness to the Porte. For these and many other reasons the viziers saw it was high time to bring Syria under the same centralised system of direct administration, civil and military, as Asia Minor; and this they accomplished in the 'sixties. The system was substantially that still in force, only one important administrative change
