Page:Syria and Palestine WDL11774.pdf/56

 that Egypt, since the digging of the Suez Canal and the development of steam communication, stood no longer in the relation to Syria that it had held a generation before. But Abdul Hamid, it must be remembered, was very slow to abandon the hope that it would come again under his control; to the persistent vitality of this hope among Turks the Tabah affair of 1906, the programme of the Committee of Union and Progress, and very recent events have given conspicuous proof. He still held that a land-way to Egypt, as also to Arabia and Irak, must, at all cost, be better assured; and that by such assurance all those provinces, together with Syria, would be knit firmly into his Empire.

Circassian Colonies.—The harbingers of Abdul Hamid in Syria were Circassians. His idea of planting these truculent refugees on the desert fringes, as irregular garrisons, to hold back the nomad Arabs, was not quite new; for Richard Burton, when British Consul at Damascus in 1870, had found groups of them already established on the Alah plateau, east of Homs. But the immigration from the Caucasus, which followed the Treaty of Berlin, gave Abdul Hamid far more Cherkess material to dispose of than his predecessor had. A part of this he settled, from 1879 onwards, along the Haj Road towards the Belka. The colonists were to be pioneers in every sense; for they had to introduce not only their ploughs where nomad Arabs had been content to pasture, but also, in the 'eighties, their own government and police; for in neither the Jaulan nor the Belka would the Imperial Government organize permanently its administration or garrisons till 1895. The lands assigned were mostly Government property according to the letter of the Ottoman law, since, no doubt, they had neither paid tax nor been tilled within the prescribed term, nor, indeed, at any time. Ottoman law did not run in Trans-Jordan, and the But nomads and half-settled Arab villagers held that the lands so disposed of were, in fact, theirs. Accordingly, local enmity to the colonists was assured from the outset, and all the years since have been filled with