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in Syria were put to death. Finally, aroused by the expressed indignation of Europe, the Turkish Government attempted to interfere and stop the wholesale slaughter, and a French corps of ten thousand men was actually landed in Syria; Ahmed Pasha and a few ringleaders, including several Jews, were arrested and beheaded.

Baalbec, a few hours' ride from Damascus, is beautiful for situation and abounds in picturesque scenery, modified by extensive meadows and winding streams. It is nearly four thousand feet above the sea and contains five thousand people, of whom one-third are Christians. The origin of Baalbec runs back far beyond historical records. It is thought by some scholars that the city existed before the Flood. One sugges

tion is that Baalbec is the Baal Gad referred to in the Book of Joshua; undoubtedly it is the sacred city for worship of the God of the Sun, and was built at first by the Phoenicians. Subsequently the name was changed to Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, by the Selucid kings, who reconstructed the Temple on the site already used. Six of the fifty-eight Corinthian columns remain, massive pillars seventy-five feet high and seven and a half feet in diameter. Near the Temple of the Sun is the Temple of Jupiter, larger than the Parthenon at Athens, erected in the second century. An inscription at the foot of a statue when translated into English reads:

"Julia, be happy."

CHAPTER XII

HIGHER EDUCATION IN TURKEY

N°

DELIGHTFUL task! to rear the tender thought,

To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,
To breath the enlivening spirit, and to fix

The generous purpose in the glowing breast!

-THOMSON.

O one can travel in Turkey, visiting the coast cities or going into the interior, without realizing that a force is working there, silently but powerfully, which is destined to change the government, if not the religion, of the empire. It is not to be wondered at that many Turkish officials view with suspicion, and some with alarm, the efforts of men from a friendly country to build up in their domain educational institutions whose students are inculcated with the idea of liberty as the term is used in America. American education in Turkey has been from the first in the hands of missionaries. Not that every instructor to-day looks upon himself as a missionary, or is regarded as such by the educated Turks; but Robert College in Constantinople, the International College in Smyrna, the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, and similar institutions in the interior of Turkey and in Egypt, have all sprung from missionary effort.

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It is difficult for the Turks to distinguish between education and missions, and for the visitor from the West the line of separation, if there be one, is not easily discerned. Missionaries and educators work hand in hand, the former sending their bright young men to the institutions under American control, and the latter returning their promising graduates to swell the ranks of pastors and teachers throughout the empire. The fact of union between missionaries and educators is seen in another relation. Now and then when there have been delays on the part of Turkish officials in granting permission to enlarge buildings, or erect new ones, or to recognize the value of diplomas or certificates granted to graduates of institutions whose governing boards meet in Boston or New York, when individual protests have not availed, the college officer and the missionary have combined forces, and sometimes carried their case to Washington, occasionally making it a subject of diplomatic inquiry.

The authorities of the American institutions are developing their work, enlarging their grounds, adding building to building, increasing their teaching corps and doubling and trebling their student bodies. The educational institutions along the Syrian coast, on the shores of the Bosphorus, in the interior of Turkey and on the Nile, backed as they are by influential men and women in America, are exerting the most potent influences in the Levant. Millions of dollars are invested in Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, Constantinople, Har

poot, and other cities, and thousands of Egyptians, Syrians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Arabians and Indians and men from other lands are learning in these American colleges arithmetic and grammar and civil government and also the dynamic statement from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be selfevident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The story of the founding of the colleges in Turkey, and especially of Robert College on the Bosphorus, reads like a romance of the East; their development by American missionaries, with the aid of money from the keenest financiers in New York and Boston, is far more gratifying to most Americans than it is satisfying to some Turks. Holding the American principle that all men have equal rights to establish religious and educational institutions, it was natural that the missionaries should early demand the right to start schools and colleges and hospitals and dispensaries in which their converts could be educated and cared for mentally and physically; the spiritual not to be forgotten in the development of the mind or the treatment of the body.

The statesmen who established and developed the colleges in the Ottoman Empire never forgot their di vine commission nor failed to remember their human nationality. When a Russian Minister assured Cyrus

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Hamlin, the founder of Robert College, that his master, "the Czar of all the Russias, would never allow Protestantism to set its foot in Turkey," Dr. Hamlin quickly replied: "My Master, the Lord of Heaven and earth, will never ask your master where He shall set His foot!"

The missionary was a true apostle sent of God. On the other hand, Dr. Hamlin, sought help from the

American Minister and from the State Department in Washington as well, when getting his college started. Further, he secured assistance from the English Ambassador, and finally he wearied the Turks by his perpetual applications and institutions until the Grand Vizier became so irritated that he said in vexation: