Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill FOREIGN GUESTS OF THE SULTAN IN SYRIA MY first introduction to Syria was through the letters of my aunt who lived there, and I was perplexed to account for the fact that these letters bore the postage-stamps of any one of five different nations. The geographies said that Syria was a Turkish province, but what could be the status of a country whose postal service was apparently under international control? Later, when I myself went to live with that aunt in Syria, I learned that the answer lay in that half-mysterious phrase, " the Capitulations,"—what the Capitulations were and how they affected Turkey will later be discussed in detail. The question of the political status of Syria arises in the mind of each new arrival in the land. A more composite population could hardly be imagined, and unlike most places where the population is international, in Syria the subjects of each foreign nation maintain to an extraordinary degree the integrity of their national life. In Crusading days, all Europeans were grouped by their Eastern opponents under the title of Frank, and to-day a corruption of the term still exists in the Syrian word Franji. The Syrians themselves have drawn this line of demarkation, designating as Franji any Occidental, European or American, and with them the word is practically synonymous with foreigner. It might seem that the result would be a social homogeneity among the Westerners resident in Syria, but such is not the case. It is true to a certain extent in the smaller places; but in large cities, like Beirut, the foreign population as a whole has never amalgamated. One finds oneself speaking of " the French colony," or the " Anglo-American community," and each one of these units is socially self-sufficient. True, there are frequent occasions when a...