Some thirty or forty years ago a change began among the people and a few enterprising men sought more favorable opportunities for making a living in foreign lands. Many of them were successful and encouraged others to follow them, until now the most profitable business of the steamships calling at Syrian ports is the carrying of emigrants back and forth. The weekly exit is numbered by the hundreds, and large numbers also return from time to time. Few of those who return to Syria remain for any length of time, for, having once tasted the liberty and experienced the opportunities of life in western lands, they are no longer content to fall back into the old, slow, unprofitable methods of the Orient. A notable change has also come over the character of the emigration in another respect. At first it was only the more enterprising, vigorous young men who went abroad to seek their fortunes. Now whole families go together. Women and girls emigrate as freely as men. At first it was only Christians who sought to improve their condition in Christian lands; now Moslems and Nusairiyeh go as freely as do the Christians. At first this emigration was a blind flight from poverty and oppressive conditions at home, with little understanding of the places to which the emigrants were going. They placed themselves literally in the hands of the steamship agents in Marseilles. Taking passage from Syria to Marseilles, they were shipped on from there in bunches, according to the advantage of the agent into whose hands they fell. They might be sent to Argentine, while the friends to whom they were going were in Massachusetts. They might be sent to Sierra Leone or to Capetown, but it was all America in their minds. The simple idea of geography in those days seemed to divide the world into two parts, Syria and America. The common people know far better now, for they discuss intelligently the conditions of life and business in the various parts of the world. Syrians are to be found in every one of the United States, from Maine to Florida, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They are in Alaska, the Sandwich Islands and the Philippines. They are in every country of Central and South America, in the West Indies and in all parts of Africa. In many places they have bought property and made permanent business arrangements.