The rulers appointed under the new régime have not all been equally capable and honest. Some have understood the language of _bakhsheesh_ as well as their Turkish predecessors. The commercial growth of the province has also been hampered by the lack of a seaport. Yet since 1861 the mountaineers, Druses and Maronites alike, have enjoyed an unprecedented quiet and an increasing material prosperity. The old feudal wars have ceased, the tyrannical political power of the Maronite hierarchy is greatly diminished, education is rapidly advancing and the valuation of property in the Lebanon district has greatly advanced. In the words of Lord Dufferin, who was a member of the international commission which framed the new plan of government, “until the present day the Lebanon has been the most peaceful, the most contented and the most prosperous province of the Ottoman Dominion.” [Illustration: A guard of Lebanon soldiers] [Illustration: The village of Deir El-Kamr, where no Druse dare dwell] Yet the cruel past has not entirely sunk into oblivion. The Maronite village of Deir el-Kamr, for instance, has still one mosque; but no Moslem dwells there, nor dare a Druse pass through this neighborhood where the massacre of unarmed Christians lasted until more than two thousand corpses lay within the enclosure of the government-house. On the other hand, there are Druse hamlets where no Maronite would trust himself. Ten years ago, when Beirut was in one of its periodic tumults, five thousand Lebanon soldiers, stalwart, brave and well-armed, encamped just outside the city limits, waiting for one more anti-Christian outbreak—which fortunately did not come—as an excuse for wiping out the Moslem population. Looking across a deep gorge of Lebanon, I once saw a file of Turkish soldiers laboriously making their way up the steep mountainside. They were seeking a murderer, so I was told, but a murderer of no common mettle; for from his inaccessible retreat among the cliffs he had sent to the government of Beirut a bold acknowledgment of his crimes, accompanied by the threat that whenever in the future a Christian should be assassinated in that city he would immediately descend to the coast and take the life of a Moslem in exchange. On a stormy winter night I sat by the charcoal fire in a Maronite hut high up among the mountains, and heard read from a grimy, much-thumbed manuscript a long poem which described the brave part played by that village in the struggles of fifty years ago. The sonorous Arabic sentences had almost an Homeric ring. Like the list of Grecian ships sounded the rhythmic roll of the local heroes of half a century gone by. And as the dull light of the fire shone on the circle of dark, bearded mountaineers, the grim lines of their faces showed that the valor of the village had not weakened with the passing years, nor had the wrongs of the village fathers been forgot. * * * * *