ill not
be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be
done. Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the
Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot,
and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that
barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical
sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which
will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.

It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French
protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there
will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later,
with regard to railway control. Northwards and eastwards the natural
delimitations seem clear enough: northwards French Syria would terminate
with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert
marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the
course of the Euphrates. But southwards there is no such natural line of
demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches
the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the
Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip
of territory lies Palestine.

Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable
territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any
other course are many and insuperable. Should the line of French
influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection
is the intervening territory to be left? At present it is Turkish, but
inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their
declaration not to leave alien peoples under the 'murderous tyranny' of
the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both by geographical situation
and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there
seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes
under if not under the French. Just as properly, if we take this view of
the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to
Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah. That
the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same
control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the
sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any
canal corresponding to that of Suez, and debo