Palestine]
submarine cable connected Latakia with Agios Theodoros, in Cyprus. All the chief ports (including Akka and Gaza) have "international " telegraph stations (cf. p. 79).
Except at the German sanatorium on the Mount of Olives, there were no wireless installations before the war, but other stations have since been established, at any rate at Hebron, Ramle, and Damascus, and no doubt at Aleppo.
(B) INDUSTRY
(1) Labour
(a) Supply of Labour
Syria as a whole is thinly populated (cf. p. 16), and the supply of labour is not generally abundant, though certain districts are, no doubt, better off than others. The Lebanon especially, in spite of a large emigration (cf. p. 17), was comparatively well peopled before the war, and the bulk of the population being Christian, male labour could be supplemented by that of women, which was an important factor in the silk industry; it is, however, not usual for women to continue work of this kind after marriage. Again, in some parts of Palestine the labour supply has been appreciably increased by Jewish immigration. A United States consular report of 1909–10 goes so far as to assert that in the south the abundance and cheapness of labour formed an obstacle to the introduction of agricultural machinery. This, however, can certainly not be said of the country at large, where scarcity of labour is a common complaint, and machinery is usually regarded as the remedy. During the war the situation has undergone a change. The countryside has been drained of men of military age, some of whom will, of course, not return; and the population has been further thinned by famine and disease. The Lebanon especially has suffered severely, being reported to have lost from half
