THE LAND OF GILEAD.* READERS of travels will probably pause

before taking up a new book on the Holy Land. Syria and Palestine have been described iu books without number and of every type, from the strong food supplied by such thorough workers as Dr. Porter and Dr. Robinson, to the milk-and-water of holiday tourists who, having during a six months' ramble been the heroes of a small drama fall of novelty to themselves, imagine that their most trivial experiences will interest their readers. A record of a month's ride in the Holy Land, therefore, may come before the public with the flat foretaste of a thrice-told tale. Mr. Oliphant's Land of rxi.lead, however, has a claim of its own upon our attention. It is an earnest endeavour to enlist sym- pathy in favour of a scheme of practical philanthropy, which has its utilitarian as well as its sentimental side. All travellers in the East have been tempted to moralise over the vast tracts of fertile land which Turkish misgovernment has made a wilderness ; and, ou the other hand, the strong feeling shown against the Jews in various countries of late years has rendered the question of their ultimate destiny one of practical urgency. To people these tenantless lands with this landless people is the idea which, though not new, Mr. Oliphant has made his Sown, and brought within the sphere of practical discussion.

Ho proposes to form a Land Company, which shall acquire a tract of country on tho east side of Jordan, and there found a Colony with a certain degree of autonomy, though still under the sovereignty of the Sultan. The colonists are, for various reasons, to be Jews. They are an oppressed people, he argues, and would therefore be glad, to emigrate,—from such a country as Roumania, for instance. They are a wealthy people, and able to invest capital in the new scheme. Their brethren in Turkey are the least down trodden of the nationalities there, and indeed enjoy a greater measure of independence and favour than in many European countries; and Jews would, consequently, have less objection than other foreigners to place themselves under the Sultan's rule. Lastly, Palestine is the country towards which all their hopes are directed. The great objection, no doubt, which will at once occur to every one, is that the genius of the Jewish people is not agricultural. Mr. Oliphant, however, considers this a necessary result of their past history and future aspira- tions, which have deterred them from acquiring land anywhere but in their own country, to which they hope ultimately to be restored ; and ho instances the Jewish colonies at Lydda and among the Sephardim in Palestine, in Morocco and other parts of Africa, and in Russia, as evidence of the latent capacity of the Jews for agriculture. Moreover, the Jews are to be the owners rather than the tillers of the soil, and the necessary labour is to be supplied chiefly by the Syrian peasantry and by refugees from other parts of Turkey.

When, therefore, this idea had acquired some consistency in Mr. Oliphant's mind, he determined to proceed to Palestine to select a site. Accordingly, after having secured for his scheme the approval of Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Salisbury, and M. Waddington, he left England for Syria in February, 1879, and, soon after landing at Beyrout, started for the east of the Jordan, accompanied by Captain Owen Phibbs.

Striking inland from Saida, and crossing the Jordan above the Bahr-el-Efuleh, the ancient Lake Merom, Mr. Oliphant proceeded southwards towards the river Jabbok, leaving on his left the interesting district of Trachonitis and the subterranean

* Tim Land of Gilead; with Excursions in the' Ltbanort,' By Lauronco Oliphant. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Sons. 1850.

town of Edrei, Near Gadara he came upon the warm springs of Amatha, nestling picturesquely among precipitous cliffs of limestone and basalt, and the terms in which he speaks of the spot as a. future sanatorium are a sufficient index of the prac- cal tone of the book :—

If a hotel and bathing-houses," he says, " were erected here, it could not fail to become a popular and frequented winter's resort for European valetudinarians. Surrounded by the most romantic scenery, and invested with associations of exceptional interest, it is only a few miles from the Luke of Tiberias, and lies in the immediate neigh- bourhood of the ruined cities of Gamala, Hippos, Aphek, Gadara,

and Seythopolis Here the health-seeker might vary the pleasures of picnic excursions into the picturesque, forest-clad mountains of Gilead with the more serious occupation of excavating the buried treasures of the Docapolis, and exhuming the monuments of a departed civilisation, or refresh hiniself after his archmological labours with the excitement of wild boar, gazelle, and partridge shooting, or with abundant fishing in the Jordan, the Yarmuk, and the Lake," It is to be hoped that the alluring prospect here held out to invalids will excuse what reads somewhat like an auctioneer's advertisement. Mr. Merill, moreover, an earlier explorer, here found, to use his own words, many "ruins of a superior de- scription, and several elegant stone chairs, with backs two and a half feet high,"---which will, no doubt, be very comfortable for future American valetudinarians.

It was only, however, after crossing the Jabbok that Mr. Oliphant found what he sought. The ancient Perma, now the Belka, is, according to him, an ideal country for an agricultural colony. Highlands 3,000 ft. high, upon which rich woods and park-like plateaus alternate with fine pasturage, are broken by luxuriant glens, and slope gradually down to the sub-tropical plain of Seisaban, at the head of the Dead Sea, 1,300 ft. below the sea-level :-

f° But the difference in feet," says Mr. Oliphant, "does not really convey an adequate notion of the difference in climate, owing to the peculiar conditions of the Jordan valley, which, being depressed below the level of the sea, produces a contrast in vegetation with the mountains of Gilead corresponding rather to a difference of 10,000ft. than of only half that elevation. The consequence is that in no part of the world could so great a variety of agricultural produce be obtained compressed within so limited a space. The Valley of the Jordan would act as an enormous hothouse for the now colony. Here might be cultivated palms, cotton, indigo, sugar, rice, sorghum, besides bananas, pine-apples, yams, sweet potatoes, and other field and garden produce. Rising a little higher, the country is adapted to tobacco, maize, castor-oil, millet, flax, sesamum, melons, gourds, cumin, coriander, anise, ochre, brinjals, pomegranates, oranges, figs; and so up to the plains, where wheat, barley, beans, and lentils of various sorts, with olives and vines, would form the staple products. Gilead especially is essentially a country of wine and oil ; it is also admirably adapted to silk.-culture; while among its forests carob or locust-bean, pistachio, jujube, almond, balsam, kali, and other profit- able trees grow wild in great profusion. All the fruits of Southern Europe, such as apricots, peaches, and plums, here grow to perfec- tion ; apples, pears, quinces thrive woll on the more extreme eleva- tion, upon which the fruits and vegetables of England might be cul- tivated, while the quick-growing eucalyptus could be planted with advantage on the fertile but treeless plains."

Really, Armida's garden is a desert to this ; and a Roumanian Jew must bo unbelieving indeed if he bear the ills he has, rather than• fly to such a paradise of gain.

Mr. Oliphant further proposes to include the Dead Sea within the colony, for the sake of its chemical and mineral deposits, and to have a railway running from Haifa down the cast bank of the Jordan, with branches to Damascus, Akaba, and Ismailia, to connect Egypt and Syria, to supply an alter- native route to India, and to convey the Damascus pilgrims on their way to Mecca ; and he relies upon a subsidy from the Turkish Government, on account of this service, to pay a con- siderable part of the expense of the railway, Mr. Oliphant is evidently not a Turkish bondholder.

The area of the proposed. colony would, in the first instance, not exceed a million and a half of acres, and a capital of 11,000,000 is estimated as sufficient for its purchase and settle- ment, as it is nearly all unoccupied. Labour is cheap, abundant, and good, and more could be supplied by refugees from Ron- melia and Bulgaria, as well as by the poorer Jewish colonists. Under a good scheme of autonomy, little danger is to be feared from the nomad Arabs, who would be driven eastwards into the Desert, while reserves could be kept for those who have be- come half settled. It would certainly be easy to subsidise some warlike tribe, like the Adwan, to keep off marauders; or the colony could be protected by a cordon of villages inhabited. by Draws, the bravest and best organised raw in Syria, and one whose sympathies and fidelity would be most readily enlisted in favour of a plan promoted by England.

As a proof of the productiveness of the soil, Mr. Oliphant MRS. LYNN LINTON'S STORIES.* mentions the cases of Abou Jabr, a Protestant Syrian settled

in Moab ; Mr. Sursuk, a Greek banker owning laud in the plain Mils. LINTON'S admirable literary facility is too well known to of Esdraelon ; and the German colony near Haifa, who are all her readers to need any commendation from us. She thinks— thriving exceedingly, well as farmers, oven under the present so far as she can be said to think at all—clearly, if not logi-, state of things. Mr. Oliphant, however, travelled. when Syria tally ; and she can express what it occurs to her to say in easy was under the rule of Midhat Pasha, who was so far from and accurate English. There are no strange words nor strained, being an exponent of the policy of Constauthiople, that the expressions in her style; she clothes her ideas iu attire so unob-. very reason of his being at Damascus was the want of harmony trusive as almost to give them an aspect of common-placeness. between his views and those current in the capital. Though, Wo read page after page without ever coming to a hitch or an therefore, our author was beguiled into believing in the exist- awkwardness ; it is like ambling over a level road amidst ence of sonic permanent improvement in the Turkish govern- scenery with which we have long been familiar. The people ment of Syria, be is wise eumigh to make a certain measure we encounter greet us with the undemonstrative imperson- of autonomy a necessary condition of the success of his enter- ality of modern etiquette ; they sometimes wear odd costumes,. prise. Accordingly, it was natural that ho should extend his and profess strange creeds ; but wo are comfortably con- tour into the Lebanon, to see for himself what autonomy can vinced all the while that the costume is a masquerade, and do. Ho found a beautiful country, every available inch of which the speech a pretence. Mrs. Linton would never incommode is cultivated, and inhabited by a peaceful, wealthy, and con- us so far as to lead us beyond the limits of her own indi- tented people, composed mainly of Druses and Maronites, viduality ; having taken us by the hand at the outset of the living together in such harmony as the intrigues of the story, she never afterwards relinquishes that hold upon us ; Christian priesthood will allow. This matter of autonomy is,

to our mind, the rock ahead. The Lebanon obtained autonomy after massacres that roused the feeling of all Europe, and picture of life, and insight into the play of human character and brought the pressure of the five Christian Powers to bear uponotive ; sometimes they have formed some theory of existence,. the Turks. The newly-bestowed autonomy in European Turkey and endeavour, by the conduct of their tale, to give the theory was brought about in a similar way. But how is it to be obtained confirmation. From Mrs. Linton's point of view, such persons are not wise in their generation. Literature, she might argue in this case ? The opportunity of the Berlin Congress is past, and nothing short of another crisis and the combined action (were argument among her accomplishments), is a trade which hold of so fruitful a field of peculation and extortion. In short, of the Powers will ever induce the ring of Pashas to loosen their we are tempted, on this ground alone, to relegate the scheme to own ends. Now, Mrs. Linton's ends arc, we apprehend, two- the limbo of proposed Turkish reforms. fold. Iu the first place, she wishes to air and formulate her likes. In the second place, she desires to exploit her clever- for his plan the good-humoured approval of Midhat Pasha, ness. The majority of her characters may be generically described who must have been pleased to see so much ingenuous faith, as Mrs. Liuton's pet aversions. Among the minority are those be went on to Constantinople, to get the necessary concession whom she regards as amiable fools. An examination of the in from the Government. He has failed, as all beneficent plans

in Turkey do fail, and as every one who knows that couutry considerable residue might disclose the presence of two or three could have foretold. All that remains for him is to keep his individuals who enjoy the distinction of being Mrs. Linton's ideals ; scheme before the eyes of Europe, as a nostrum to be applied but since the latter arc more inanimate and featureless than the- at the next convulsion of the Sick Mau. rest of the confraternity, we may, for practical purposes, safely disregard them. It should. be borne in mind, moreover, that Apart from this project of colonisation, Mr. Oliphant's book even the liveliest of Mrs. Linton's pet aversions are by no moans abounds in passages of interest. He has recognised, what necessarily lifelike. In looking upon the ordinary human is little understood in England,—that the curse of Turkey is being, she sees in him or her only those traits and qualities not so much religious hatred as class oppression. The Chris- which are distasteful to Mrs. Linton; and the portraits she tian lower classes, enjoying the protection of foreign Consuls, paints, being composed exclusively of these elements, resemble are much better off than the Moslem, left to.the tender mercies nothing which anybody besides their author has seen. Indeed, of their own officials ; while Christians in high office arc oven according to the testimony of her writings, she is an author worse administrators than the Pashas, and more corrupt, as they vehement and strongly-flavoured on the emotional side ; and have had to pay a higher price for their preferment. The future thin, fickle, but acute on the intellectual. Destitute (and hope of Turkey lies not in the predominance of any one of the rightly so) of confidence in her own conclusions, she fears to let subject races, but iu the rise of a middle class interposed then stand or fall for what they are ; on the contrary, she seeks between the highest and the lowest, and a system of deem- to disguise the fact that they were formed from impulse and 'tralisation which shall give this middle class a share in the prejudice, and to insinuate the idea that they are the result of Government, and foster the growth of a healthy and intelli- pure intellectual insight. In other words, Mrs. Linton is gout public opinion. The last chapter of the book is devoted ashamed of being feminine and impulsive, and tries to make to showing the strategic value of Syria, and the necessity for herself out judicious and masculine. The deception is an such reforms as shall place it beyond the reach of Russian laud- amusingly transparent one, and yet it may be doubted whether hunger. Whatever may be thought on this subject, Mr. Oliphant

well deserves a hearing. rs. Linton herself be not in see degree misled by it, for

liest criticism cannot fail to hit upon seine defects in it. It is she considers herself to be a person of strong convictions ; that certainly overladen with rather crude and rather tedious tope- she fancies she potently believes some things, and more potently graphical disquisitions, which, being the result of so hurried a disbelieves a great many other things. Nothing, however, trip, are hardly calculated to inspire confidence ; and we must withhold our assent to Mr. Olipht a the recently promised labours of

the Palestine Exploration Fund. Again, there is a frequent but she is no less incapable of not believing anything. We use

very pleasant book to read. '