ure,
double-action German waltz. And this with thousands of their compatriots
starving in the streets and little naked children banding together to
drive pariah dogs with stones from the street offal they were worrying,
if perchance it might yield a meal. Meanwhile decent Anglo-Saxon
Christendom was battling in that very town under adverse conditions to
succour human destitution which had been largely caused by the callous
operations of these soulless parasites. The Christians of Syria have no
monopoly of such scandals. Yet there are otherwise intelligent people
who speak of modern Christianity as an automatic promoter of ethics, and
have the effrontery to try to thrust it on the East as a moral panacea.
It is human ideals which make or mar a soul when once the seed of any
sound religion has been sown, and they depend upon environment and
climate more than our spiritual pastors admit; otherwise, why this
missionary activity among oriental Christians? If you try to grow garden
flowers in the rich, rank irrigation soil of the Nile valley they
flourish luxuriantly, but soon develop a marked tendency to revert to
their wild type, and it is permissible to suppose that human character
is even more sensitive to its mental and physical surroundings. Any
observant teacher of oriental youth will tell you that the promise of
their precocious ability is seldom fulfilled by their maturity. Even the
"country-born" children of British parents are considered precocious at
their preparatory school in England, and, if not sent home to be
educated, are apt to fall short of their parents' intellectual and
moral standard in later years. The Mamelukes knew what they were about
when they kidnapped hardy Albanian youths to carry on their rule in
Egypt and passed over their own progeny. Kingsley has shown us in
"Hypatia" what the Nile valley did for the Christian Church.

It is not a question of Jew, Christian, or Moslem that the
administrative authorities in Syria and Palestine will have to consider
beyond ensuring that each shall follow his religion unmolested. They
will have to defend the many from the machinations of the few and the
few from the violent reprisals of the many. It is statecraft that is
wanted, not politics or religious dogma.

In Mesopotamia there has not been much missionary effort hitherto, and
there is not a good case for exploiting it as a missionary field beyond
certain limits. The riparian townsfolk are respectable peo