railway enterprises of his reign are of capital significance for the political future of Syria; but, being still incomplete, they have been able to exercise but a small part of their destined influence. These are the Hejaz railway, which promises to make Damascus again the chief gathering point of Moslem pilgrims, and the Baghdad railway, which should give back to Aleppo some of its lost importance in the commerce of East and West. Both cities, indeed, have resumed something of their cosmopolitan' character; but the Hejaz railway must reach Mecca and the Baghdad railway the Gulf before either will relieve the Suez Canal of any great proportion of the men and merchandise that pass through it to-day.
Settlement of the Country.—The consolidating effect, whether designed or accidental, of these measures of Abdul Hamid's reign was supplemented by a deliberate governmental effort to diminish nomadism, to whose disturbing social influence, exercised from east and south, all Syrian history bears witness. The precedent of the Trans-Jordan agricultural colonies was followed in the north. Strong bodies of Cherkess were settled round the head of the Syrian Desert, on Imperial estates about Membij, and also at Rakka; and both in the Euphrates valley and in Trans-Jordan measures were taken to encourage or compel settlement along the arable fringes. These measures took the form of free or favourable grants of land, opening of local markets, establishment of administrative posts and police caracols, and, latterly, road construction and the institution of a posting service from Aleppo to Felluja and Baghdad. In the Trans-Jordan country, where settlement had been slowly spreading for a generation, amid a welter of tribal claims and feuds, the Government undertook at last, in the 'nineties, to assure and promote the process by establishing garrisoned posts from Kuneitra southwards, and by introducing administrative machinery of the same type as in the rest of Syria. A mutessarif appeared at Kerak, for example, in 1895, and kaimakams and mudirs fol-
