If it seems clear that for New Armenia the proper protecting Power is Russia, it is no less clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria, Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting Power is France.  Historically France’s connection with Syria dates from the time of the Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, and of late years the ties between the two countries have been both strengthened and multiplied.  The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San Stefano, and of Berlin have all recognised the affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical standpoint, have the encyclicals of Leo XIII. in 1888 and 1898.  Similarly, it was France who intervened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who landed troops for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up till the outbreak of the European War.  France was the largest holder, as she was also the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the harbour of Beirut, without doubt destined to be one of the most flourishing ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise.  And perhaps more important than all these, as a link between Syria and France, has been the educational penetration which France has effected there.  What the American missionaries did for Armenia, France has done for Syria, and according to a recent estimate, of the 65,000 children who attended European schools throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended French schools.  When we consider that that proportion has been maintained for many years in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the intellectual bond between the Syrian and the French now is.  The French language, similarly, is talked everywhere:  it is as current as is modern Greek in ports of the Levant.

In virtue of such claims few, if any, would dispute the title of France to be the protecting Power in the case of Syria.  Here there will not be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be done.  Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot, and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.

It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later, with regard to railway control.  Northwards and eastwards the natural delimitations seem clear enough:  northwards French Syria would terminate with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the course of the Euphrates.  But southwards there is no such natural line of demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence.  Inset into this long strip of territory lies Palestine.