Palestine]
last decades of the eighteenth century middle and southern Syria did not appear to France or any other European Power to have much political significance, the south-eastern angle of the Levant being considered a blind alley. Such politico-economic interest as the Western nations felt in Syria was directed to the north of the country, where Aleppo had been a half-way house to India and the East since the days of Queen Elizabeth. Moreover, towards the end of the eighteenth century the political, effect of the platonic interest which Louis XIV and Louis XV had displayed in the Maronites was virtually obliterated by the anti-religious tendencies of the French Revolution. Jezzar turned the French residents out of his coast towns in 1791, and found none to object; and the French eclipse was completed by Napoleon's open avowal of anti-Christian policy in Egypt. Consequently, on invading Syria, Napoleon found, to his disappointment, Emir Beshir arrayed with Jezzar, and the Maronites helping, though somewhat halfheartedly, to beat him back from the walls of Acre; while the British admiral, Sir Sydney Smith, had no difficulty in instituting an accord with Beshir, which subsequent British hospitality and assistance, after the latter's exile from the mountain, in December 1799, went far to cement.
After 1808 Beshir's power grew in middle and south Syria, and became paramount when the Circassian Abdullah had succeeded to Acre in 1820 and put the Jumblatt chief out of the way. British influence had now every chance, France being discredited by the long absence of her flag from the Levant. But, like France before her, Great Britain found no conspicuous opportunity for using political influence. The Lebanese had yet to develop acute antagonism of creed; and, so long as but one European Power, whether France before 1800 or Great Britain afterwards, was concerning itself with them at one time, they lacked the external temptation to dissension which was to offer itself presently. British influence, therefore, was doing as yet no more harm in
