"Eighty-nine thousand five hundred Moslems, twelve thousand Christians, five thousand Jews, and about five thousand Druses, Bedouins, and other miscellaneous classifications. About half the Christians belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, and the rest are Latins, Maronites, Syrians, and Armenians. "As you are well aware, Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world. It is mentioned in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, and very often in other books of the Bible, but the scriptural references do not tell us how old it is. The traditions of the Jews, Christians, and Moslems concerning the origin of Damascus do not agree, but by sifting them down, and harmonizing as much as possible, we may suppose it was founded by Uz, the son of Aram, and was a well-established city before the birth of Abraham. The kings of Syria lived here for more than three hundred years; one of them was conquered by King David, but the subjection did not last long. Afterward it was conquered by the Assyrians and added to their empire, and subsequently it was a possession of Persia. "It would take several pages for me to tell you the history of Damascus, and as it might be tedious, and you can find it in any good encyclopædia, we will take a jump of three thousand years or less and come down to our own times. The most exciting event of modern days in Damascus was the massacre of the Christians in 1860, when five or six thousand people were killed for no other reason than their belief in the religion of Bethlehem. The whole of the Christian quarter was burnt, not a house being left uninjured. About half of it has been rebuilt, but some of the buildings are very frail, and it will be a long time before this portion of Damascus resumes its former appearance. "Our guide through the streets was a Christian whose father was killed at the time of the massacre. The family managed to escape to the mountains, where they wandered for days, and were very near starvation. In addition to the thousands who were killed, there were many who died of wounds and starvation, while hundreds of women and children were sold into slavery. "We asked Doctor Bronson how it all happened, and he said it was an affair of international politics growing out of the Crimean War, and the support that England gave to the Turkish Government against Russia. The Treaty of Paris, after the Crimean War, contained a clause which was intended to prevent foreign intervention in the affairs of Turkey, and allow the Sultan to control his Christian subjects. As a Moslem generally believes that the best thing to do with an adherent of any other religion than his own is to kill him, the result of this unhappy provision of the treaty was to cause the Moslems to slaughter the Christians among them.