Palestine]
Ainsworth's, Kinglake's, Thomson's, Lamartine's, Warburton's, &c.—narrate the authors' travels under his ægis, and some of the travellers were not mere globetrotters In 1839 Moses Montefiore discovered for Europe the Palestinian Jews and the possibilities of Jewish restoration. In 1835 a British Commission was studying a line for an overland route to the Euphrates; and the little opposition it encountered, in its extraordinary task of hauling steamers in sections overland from the Orontes to the Euphrates, is a testimony to Ibrahim's power, all the more significant because the British held their permission, not from him, hut from the Sultan with whom he was at war. During those ten years Europe progressed from mediæval ignorance of Syria to almost as much knowledge of it as she has had up to the present war. When Lady Hester Stanhope settled in the Lebanon, in 1814, it was a wild, unknown region; and the British Government could only keep precarious touch with Pitt's niece through a Levantine consular agent in Cyprus. When she died, in 1839, a visit to her at Joun had become a common incident of the grand tour; and a British Consul rode up from Saida to collect and seal her effects.
Lebanon Question; Beshir.—Finally, for good or for ill, it was the Egyptian occupation that caused Syria to become a cockpit of Great Powers. If it did not make the Lebanon question, it brought it on. The fault was only in part Ibrahim's. During nine years of Egyptian occupation there was no more Lebanon question than there had been since the establishment of the Shehab dynasty and the emigration of the Yemenite Druses. Not that the Mountain had been an abode of peace during those hundred years; but its intermittent intestine warfare had been feudal, not religious—wars of one Druse sheikh or group of sheikhs against another—Jumblatts against Yezbekis, or one Shehab against others, with some Maronites or some Orthodox Greeks or some Metawalis enlisted for one or for both. Hitherto Druses had led in council and action, thanks to their superior feudal cohesion, their
