Palestine]
lowed throughout the Belka region, and southward as far as Shobak and Ma'an. In 1896 considerable irregular forces were sent against the Hauran Druses; and with the exile of over 1,000 of their notables to Crete, Rhodes, and Asia Minor some peace was secured. On the southern desert frontier Bir es-Seba was selected to be a focus of settlement and a steadying influence. Made an administrative centre in 1904, it was garrisoned and provided with solid government buildings; and an experiment was mnade, not unsuccessfully, with a Court of Tribal Appeal, to which representatives of the nomadic and half-settled Arabs of all the region east of the Egyptian frontier were called as assessors.
Christian Influx into Palestine.—Meanwhile, Palestine became an ever more irksome possession for Abdul Hamid. As he watched colonists, pilgrims, and tourists pour in an ever-swelling stream from Christendom and Jewry, he foresaw a second Lebanon to be constituted at the gates of Egypt and Arabia. Christian missions and educational institutions had been increasing steadily throughout Syria during all his reign, despite studied and obstinate obstruction. The American representatives, who dated back (at Beirut) to 1821, he regarded with least distrust, relying on the official aloofness of the United States from Old World politics. They had, however, extended their activities greatly since 1870, rebuilding the Beirut College in 1872, and opening schools all over Palestine; and, disinterested though they might be, the encouragement they offered to emigration from Lebanon and elsewhere, and the democratic and liberal ideas which their curriculum introduced to the minds of Armenians and Syrians, were disquieting to an Imperial Absolutist. Worse than these, however, were the French Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition, of St. Vincent de Paul, and others, who had been spreading all over Syria since 1859, and had established in Jerusalem a centre of educational and other charitable effort.
