Page:Syria and Palestine WDL11774.pdf/57

 strife. The Government consistently supported its colonists, rounding up more than once on their behalf an irreconcilable tribe or clan, as, for example, the Abbad Arabs near Es-Salt, or a section of the Beni Hasan, near Jerash, and sending it to cool its passions west of Jordan or in the Eastern Desert; and the Cherkess have been able to hold on. But the Arabs have not forgotten what they believe to be their territorial rights, and the racial feud smoulders unquenched.

Ådministration and Communications.—In pursuance of his policy Abdul Hamid took in hand, in the early 'eighties, the public insecurity of northern Syria and southern Palestine, multiplying guards and increasing garrisons, and paying particular and unwelcome attention then and later to both the Kurds of Amanus and the robber Armenians of Zeitun. Improved communications, however, he knew, or soon learned, would provide the most effective means to his end. In the year 1885, when the Jaffa-Jerusalem track was improved into a metalled chaussée, began an era of road-building throughout Syria, and in 1886 it was followed by one of railway construction. This was destined, in the course of the next thirty years, to give Syria through-connection with Constantinople, a railway from Aleppo to Bir es-Seba linked to five ports, and trunk lines to Arabia on the one hand and Mesopotamia on the other. When it is remembered, further, that such harbour structures as exist in Syria, and the equipment of principal cities like Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem with broad ways, modern buildings, electric lighting, tramways, and other convenient apparatus, are also of Abdul Hamid's time, one is bound to admit that a good deal of beneficent construction-almost all, in fact, that makes Syria as a whole the most civilised province of Turkey at this day-stands to the credit of a Sultan whose energies are popularly supposed to have been uniformly destructive and sinister.

Railway Schemes.—Two, in particular, among the [2947]