As has been said, however, the ordinary traveler sees no evidences of strife in the streets of Beirut. The largest and most conspicuous class of people whom he meets are not assassins or revolutionists, but students. This is no new thing, for the city has long been famous as a seat of learning. From the third to the sixth centuries A. D., its law school was the greatest in the Roman Empire, excelling even that of the capital and numbering its students by the thousand. One of the three commissioners who prepared the _Institutes_ of Justinian was Professor Dorotheus of Beirut. In the early Saracen centuries, also, the city attained much scholarly fame and sent forth many of the foremost authorities on Moslem law and doctrine. At the present day it is the greatest educational center in the Near East. Besides the schools maintained by each of the native churches and the mosque-schools and government academies, and institutions supported—presumably for political reasons by Italy and Russia, there are schools or colleges of the French Sisters of Charity, Sisters of the Holy Family, Ladies of Nazareth, Lazarists, Franciscans, Capuchins and Jesuits, the German Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, the British Syrian Mission, the Church of Scotland Mission to the Jews, and the American Presbyterian Mission, not to mention a number of others which have been organized by private individuals of missionary and philanthropic spirit. The total number of students who are being educated along modern lines is over twenty thousand. Yet in this city of schools and colleges, if the stranger tells his coachman to drive to _el-Kulliyet_—“the College”—he will be taken without question to an institution which is incorporated under the laws of the State of New York; and a short visit here will show why this is acknowledged to be _the_ college of Beirut. Upon a beautifully situated campus of fifty acres, twenty imposing stone buildings house the seven departments of what is really a large, well-equipped university of eighty instructors and nearly a thousand students, with observatory and library and scientific laboratories and hospitals, as well as literary, dramatic, musical and scientific societies and its own printing-press and monthly magazine. Many important things are being learned and done at the Syrian Protestant College; but what strikes the observant visitor as most admirable of all is the spirit of the institution, a spirit of thoroughness and manliness and loyal fraternity and encouraging optimism. More than anything else in Beirut—yes, more than anything else in western Asia—the “S. P. C.,” as its students and alumni call it, stands for the best gifts of Western civilization and for a new hope which, lighted first in beautiful Syria, is already beginning to shine on many a land far out of sight of heavenward-reaching Lebanon. CHAPTER IV THE SPIRIT OF OLYMPIA