Palestine]
been drawing apart into fanatic camps. The Druses, with secular predominance to lose, continued restless, ashamed of such degradation of their chiefs as Churchill witnessed in the 'forties. The Maronites, who stood to gain, were irritatingly complacent under their Emir Haidar. The newly-established paramount authority was alien and derogatory. If both Druses and Maronites used frankly to acknowledge the suzerainty of a Sultan in distant Stambul, they murmured now at sovereignty exercised through a mushir in Saida.They had, both of them, learned by this time to appeal against his authority and one another to outside Powers of unknown strength but known rivalry. France and Great Britain had, indeed, returned to governmental harmony at home since 1842, but in the Lebanon their representatives were still at odds, and when trouble broke out again in 1845 were manifestly partisans. Their positions and aims differed as positive from negative. Poujade, inspired by the colonial element in the French Opposition, aspired to change the political and social state of the Lebanon, to promote a protectorate of his nation in Syria, and to invert the secular relation of Maronites to Druses. Rose, acting on his Government's fixed policy of preventing the introduction into Turkey of any foreign protectorate or sphere of exclusive influence, encouraged Lebanese society to resume, under Omar Pasha, the same mutual relations as had existed in the earlier days of Emir Beshir. France, for obvious reasons, hoped to compass her subversive aims through the Maronites; Great Britain, for reasons equally obvious, endeavoured to preserve the status quo ante by means of the Druses. Strong divergence of sentiment and sympathy was added to the political discord of the Consuls. The Maronites, as they then were, mariolatrous, priest-ridden, inconstant in warfare, and only in small part willing to fight at all, did not commend themselves to Rose as did the keen, warlike Druses. By the recent action of the
