my; even Rohrbach deprecates the fact that "only a few of
the higher officials in Syria are chosen from among the natives of the
country, while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are sent out from
Constantinople," and he attributes to this policy "the feeling against
the Turks, which is most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's
periphrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master in its own house
when the Turk has been removed. The future status and boundaries of
Syria can no more be forecast than those of Armenia at the present stage
of the War; yet here, too, certain tendencies are clear. In some form or
other Arab Syria will retain her connection with France, and her growing
population will no longer be driven by misgovernment to emigration.

Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for the last quarter of a
century, and during the same period the Jews, whose birthright in
Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their
native land--not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them
than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse
than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came
almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern
Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander
II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The
Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of
their last civil rights, _pogroms_ of life itself; they came to
Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there
increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.

The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of
flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been
hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to
outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de
Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were
taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered
the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.

Each colony is now governed by an elective council of inhabitants, with
committees for education, police, and the arbitration of disputes, and
they have organised co-operative unions which make them independent of
middlemen in the disposal of their produce. Their production has rapidly
risen in quantity and value, through the industry