The Thistle and the Cedar of Lebanon

by Habeeb Risk Allah

present English consul at Jaffa, who has so materially benefited his country), to purchase a promising piece of land in a healthy and elevated position an hour’s ride from the town of Beyrout.

Fourthly.—To build there a hospital, and in the town a dispensary for out-door patients. The cost of this ground and buildings would not exceed one thousand pounds. Separate private rooms, attached to the hospital, would be very desirable for travellers, who needing medical aid or nursing, and being able to pay for the same, would prefer being thus lodged to going to an hotel. This would be a great boon, especially to the English, who might thus feel greater confidence and security in their visits to this interesting country; knowing that, in case of illness or accident, they could there receive proper medical treatment, and every care necessary to ensure their recovery. The physician attached to the institution might, when called in to attend opulent European or native families, be permitted to charge a small fee, which could be regulated by the committee, and which fee, or half of it, might go towards the hospital expenses.

Fifthly.—If funds continued to permit, to build, in connection with this hospital (but in the town), schoolrooms for boys and girls, where they might be thoroughly taught their own language, and in it go through a course of Christian instruction, learn needlework and household duties.

Sixthly.—I propose that the requisite medicines, surgical instruments, furniture, bedding, and materials for school use, be supplied by voluntary contributions, such Christian or charitable tradespeople as feel disposed to support such institutions contributing their mites thereto in lieu of paying money.

Seventhly.—It would be very desirable, when the hospital was constructed, if the physician there would take in as many Syrian pupils to educate as the funds permitted; to be sent, when deemed by him fit, to England to improve themselves at the hospitals here, and to increase their Christian knowledge; afterwards to be employed in the hospitals or dispensaries, which, it is to be hoped, will soon, from so excellent a commencement, increase all over Syria; for it would be desirable that eventually all posts connected with these institutions should be occupied by intelligent natives, who could afford to be employed at much lower rates of salary, and who would exercise a greater influence over their fellow-townsmen if only from their superior knowledge of their mother tongue.

I have now endeavoured to shew that, with an outlay of two thousand pounds, very commodious institutions might be established, and a large piece of ground be purchased at Beyrout, if a Society were formed for their establishment in Syria. Meanwhile, I have reckoned upon the charitable disposition of the class of annual subscribers; and in this Christian land, where money is so cheerfully granted for the promotion of good and alleviation of suffering, I may safely reckon on this bounty attaining about five hundred pounds per annum, not one fraction of which but may, with judicious arrangement, safely treble the amount in the course of a very few years.

I have as yet made no allusion as to the uses to which the land purchased in Beyrout might be applied besides the erection of a hospital upon it. Any surplus land could, at a very trifling original outlay, be planted out with mulberry-shoots; and these, if properly managed, would, in the course of three years, be fit to

rear the silk-worm. After the final erection of the proposed establishment at Beyrout, and when it had been working a year, I should recommend that the society, in lieu of permitting the surplus funds on hand to remain idle, should vote the same to the purchase of some tract of land in the immediate neighbourhood of Damascus or Beyrout, and to have plantations in the fertile district of Antioch, where land and labour are excessively cheap. Thus, an outlay of one thousand pounds in landed property would, if it were all planted with mulberries, yield, in the course of a few years, an annual revenue (if the silk were sold in the Syrian market), of about two hundred pounds per annum; if reeled for European purposes, nearly double that amount. And this revenue would go on steadily increasing as the trees became older and yielded more leaves for the nourishment of a greater number of worms, and as, with the profits of the silk, additional grounds might be purchased and cultivated, I could safely guarantee that, were the society’s efforts judiciously supported by efficient agents, in from fifteen to twenty years this and similar institutions would not only be enabled entirely to support themselves from the revenue of their estates, independent of any succour from the society, but they would even have surplus funds for the establishment of like minor institutions in the interior.

At the first outset, the cultivation of the lands acquired in Beyrout might devolve upon the parents or destitute relatives of such of the poorer boys as were receiving a gratuitous education at the schools attached to the institutions, and the poorer class of girls educated at the schools, if permitted, might, during one month in the year, be occupied in reeling off the silk produced by the cocoons on the Institution’s estates.

It is my idea, that the system of education should consist of two distinct schools or classes for both boys and girls; the upper or high school to be appropriated solely for the superior education of the sons and daughters of such wealthy and respectable natives as have the means and inclination of advancing their children in after life, and on whom languages, drawing, music, various species of needlework, and other like accomplishments, would not be uselessly lavished; while, on the other hand, the lower school should strictly confine itself to orphans and children of the labouring and poorer classes, who might be instructed to read and write their own tongue with ease and facility, at the same time that they were initiated into useful trades and professions, and the girls of this class taught plain needlework, and no useless accomplishments. As regards the diet and care of this latter class, strict attention should he paid to cleanliness, regularity, order, truthfulness, and other good habits; at the same time that their food and raiment should, though sufficient, be neither superabundant, nor consist of such articles as might induce them in after-years, when left to battle their way through the world, to have a hankering after dainties and luxuries wholly beyond the compass of their slender means.