American education is revolutionizing the Orient. It has been one of the chief modernizing forces in Egypt, it had much to do with the revolution in Persia, and it is the basis of the reorganization of the whole Turkish Empire. The first schools of Egypt were started by the missionaries of the United Presbyterian Church, whose educational institutions now cover the Nile Valley. This church has schools in the Sudan and a great American college at Asyut, several hundred miles from Cairo. The college was started in a donkey stable more than forty years ago, and it has been turning out graduates ever since. It has now more than one thousand students who are housed in ten large two-story buildings, and it has three of the finest halls to be found in the East. These are situated just outside Asyut, at the junction of the Nile with the great canal north of that city. The college has about three hundred women.
These are not stones of the field, but great blocks of marble, many of them beautifully carved—the remains of the wondrous city of Diana
Storks build their nests in the palaces of Ephesus and the peasants fence their fields with chunks of marble from its once magnificent temples
There is a great rustling as the silkworms attack their breakfast of mulberry leaves. Every year representatives of the silk industry in the Lebanon go abroad to get worms for breeding, as those bred in that region do not lay healthy eggs
I visited the college at Asyut not long ago. It is full to overflowing, and notwithstanding the new structure just completed it needs more money and more buildings. It has a great prestige throughout Egypt, and with a little money its efficiency could easily be doubled. The college is said to give a better education than the government institutions, and that at the lowest possible cost. The tuition is nominal. For the poorest schools it is only about one dollar a term in money, and the ordinary rate is about ten dollars a year. The cost of the education varies with the taste of the students. These are of all classes from the sons of the poorest fellah to the heir of the highest pasha or richest merchant. There are three kinds of accommodations, the cost of which ranges from thirty-five dollars a year upward. The wealthy Egyptian boy can have his own room, or groups can live four in a room. He can eat at the best table, or he can get cheaper board with meat three or four times a week. On the other hand, he can work his way through college, furnishing his own food, buying vegetables and fish at very low cost. Many of the boys bring their bread from home. It is made of ground corn or millet and baked in cakes an inch thick. These cakes are toasted until they are as hard as stone, in which shape they will go through the term. Before going to a meal the students dip their bread in buckets of water set out for the purpose, and when it is soft carry it with them to the table.
The Asyut institution has its graduates in all the government departments of Egypt. They are among the leading merchants of the country, and every town has numbers of them. Many of them are Copts and not a few are Mohammedans. I am told that there are more than fifteen thousand boys now being educated in the United Presbyterian schools and colleges.
Shortly before Sultan Abdul Hamid was ousted by the Young Turk party and carried to his prison in Saloniki, he referred bitterly to the work that Robert College had done in unsettling his empire. Said he: “That institution has cost me Bulgaria, and it is like to lose me my throne.”
He was right. Robert College was founded in Constantinople in 1863 by a New York merchant named Robert, who gave a large part of his fortune to this institution. He was aided by the Reverend Cyrus Hamlin, D.D., who was, I think, the real organizer. Since then its graduates have formed the leaven for new ideas throughout the Near East. Some of its graduates organized the colleges and schools in Bulgaria. Others have been teaching in schools throughout the Turkish Empire; many have acted as officers of the Government, and some of the best leaders of Turkey to-day got their education at Robert College.
Robert College has now five hundred or six hundred students, including Mohammedans, Jews, Armenians, and Russians, as well as representatives of the other nations about. The teaching is non-sectarian, although all are required to attend daily prayers and go to services on Sunday. The college has won the approval of the Government, but the officials want it incorporated as a Turkish institution so it will be subject to their laws. To this the Americans naturally object. They say that they are organized under the laws of New York and they expect to stand by all the rights which they now enjoy as an American corporation under the protection of the United States Government.
There is no doubt that the Americans are sensible in preferring the protection of Uncle Sam to that of the Sultan. Conditions are bound to be unsettled in this part of the world for years to come. There will be revolutions and counter-revolutions before the Turks come down to a solid, substantial, modern government. There is always the fear that the college will be put under a strict censorship, as used to be the case. As it is now, the students can read what books they like, and there is little trouble as to the newspapers. They can go where they please without passports, and the present government seems to be doing all it can to promote education.
Under the régime of Abdul Hamid it was far different. In his time every newspaper was carefully looked over by Turkish officials, and all sentences or words objectionable to the Government were cut out. This was true of papers coming in through the mail as well as of the native publications. Here in Beirut a Sunday weekly is published devoted largely to the life and sayings of our Saviour. The censors objected to it, saying: “The paper is a dangerous one, for in it they kill a King of the Jews every week. This might suggest the assassination of the Sultan, and we cannot permit it.”
Dr. Bliss, the president of the American University of Beirut, once imported an old copy of Shakespeare. It was kept at the customs house, the censor objecting to its importation. Said the latter: “Shakespeare is not a good book for the Turks. It has in it the story of a man named Macbeth who killed a king. It would be a bad example for our people.” Dr. Bliss succeeded in getting his Shakespeare through by saying he had another copy of the same book, which, as it was already in the country, could not be taken out, and he would be glad to trade this for the new copy. The censor consented, accepted the Shakespeare which cost a dollar, and admitted the fine old edition instead.
At another time some New Testaments sent to Constantinople were held back by one of the censors because of the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians. Galata is one of the divisions of Constantinople, and the censor asked: “Who is this man Paul, and why is he writing to our people in Galata?” He was with difficulty persuaded that St. Paul was dead and that his letter was not part of a plot. There is a story that a textbook on chemistry was kept out because a censor objected to the term H₂O, saying that it seemed to mean that Hamid II (the Sultan, Abdul Hamid) amounted to nothing.
In addition to Robert College and the institution at Asyut there is one here at Beirut which is quite as important as either of the others. I refer to the American University of Beirut, founded by Americans in 1863, which has become the Harvard and Yale of the Near East. It has had thousands of graduates, and its doctors and lawyers stand at the heads of their professions in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Persia, and India. It has more than nine hundred students, all Orientals, representing every part of the Levant.
This institution was founded by Presbyterians, but the instruction is non-sectarian. The faculty has about one hundred and twenty professors, most of them Americans, and it is a thoroughly up-to-date university. It has a medical department which, with its hospitals, treats thousands of patients a year. It has physical, chemical, and other laboratories, a large library, and ethnological and industrial museums devoted to exhibits from Syria and Turkey.
Armenian children begin to make themselves useful at an early age. Centuries of hardships under anti-Christian rulers have made these people resourceful and self-reliant. They are the shrewdest traders of the East
American relief in the Near East takes the practical form of getting the people back to the land, much of which has been devastated by one war after another
During my stay here I have visited the college. It is beautifully located, the buildings being situated on the bluffs south of Beirut and running from them down to the sea. Standing upon the campus, which contains about fifty acres, one faces the glorious Mediterranean, while at his back are the snow-capped mountains of Lebanon with the rich vegetation climbing their slopes. The institution has a gymnasium, tennis courts, and good athletic grounds. Its students play football, baseball, and cricket. They are full of college spirit and have their college papers, their college songs, and their college yell.
The boys have silver cups and other trophies which are contended for by the various athletic teams, and these Persians, Greeks, Syrians, Arabs, Egyptians, Armenians, and Turks are being welded into one brotherhood by the hard knocks of football and the track.
The Beirut University is an American college and a Christian college as well, but it does not attempt to proselytize, and the Moslem can come to it without changing his religion. It insists only that everyone who goes through its courses shall attend chapel and the Bible classes, which study the Bible as one of the great influences in the work of the world. Once the Moslem students struck against these regulations. They refused to go to chapel and took an oath not to attend the Bible classes. The strike created a sensation, and for a time it seemed as though it might do serious damage. The faculty, however, headed by the president, Dr. Howard S. Bliss, stood firm, saying that the school was a Christian college. They demanded that all students attend the religious services, and the result was that most of the strikers came in, and the college has gone along on its original lines.
In talking about this to the Mohammedan students Dr. Bliss said:
“Our college was established to give the Mohammedan world the best the Christian world has. Our aim is to make of you broad-minded, intelligent men whether you continue to be Moslems or become Christians. We believe that the best thing we have is our religion, so we are bound to let you know what it is. Whether you accept it or not rests with yourselves. If, upon investigation, you still think the Moslem religion the best, we believe that the knowledge you have of our religion will make you better and broader Moslems. Religion is for man, not man for religion, and we want you to have the training which will make each one of you the best man, whether he be Christian or Moslem.”
To-day the Mohammedan students attending the services look upon them as largely educational, and they study the Bible as history and literature.
The influence of colleges like this goes far and wide. The students come from villages all over the Turkish Empire and from those of India and Persia as well. Going home, each forms a little hot-bed for the growth of independent thought.
Civilized ideas are spread in other ways besides these. One of the great means of such distribution is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which is attended by nearly half a million Mohammedans from all parts of the Orient. At that time Mecca becomes a great camp meeting or bush meeting, such as we farmers have in Virginia. The people come together and gossip. They discuss the crops and ask one another how they are getting along. Hassan Ali of Egypt says to Mohammed of Turkey, “How is business? Are you making money, and how does your government treat you?” Mohammed replies that the Turks are taxed to death, but they hope for much under the new Sultan. Thereupon Hassan says that the English have cut down the taxes in Egypt and that the church has plenty of money in the treasury. He tells how he has been able to send his boy to college, and that he hopes he will some day be an official. The Turk, thereupon, longs for a better government. At the same time the college students tell what they have learned, and as a result the twentieth-century spirit of modern progress is stirring the Mohammedan world.
In addition to the collegiate work great advances in the spread of our civilization are being made by the Protestant missions. There are now thousands of native Christians in Syria and from seventy-five to one hundred thousand native Christians in the empire of Turkey. The American missionaries alone have more than one hundred schools, with five or six thousand pupils, and the English have many more.
Here in Beirut is the largest and most up-to-date publishing house in the Orient. It belongs to the American mission, and annually turns out tens of thousands of Bibles, school textbooks, and other works on religious and scientific subjects. Altogether, it has published more than seven hundred different works in Arabic, and it is estimated that it has printed in the neighbourhood of a billion pages of one kind or other. It issues around one hundred thousand volumes a year, containing altogether something like thirty million pages. Its Bibles published in Arabic are sold throughout the Mohammedan world.
The medical missionaries are doing a great deal in all parts of the Orient. I have seen their hospitals everywhere on my trips around the world. They are to be found in all parts of India, far up the Nile Valley, and in the leading centres of the Holy Land. One of the best I have visited is situated at Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, and headed by Dr. Torrence, who has been treating the Bedouins and others there for the last thirty years. In my talk with him the question of tuberculosis came up, and he described the evils of the great white plague as they are found in his region on the very edge of the desert. He says tuberculosis is rife among the Bedouins although they live out of doors in the purest air all the time. He thinks that the disease is spread largely by the cattle. About 50 per cent. of the cows have tuberculosis, and the people live chiefly on milk.
Another doctor connected with the hospital tells me that Syria had no consumption until about twenty-five years ago, when the disease was brought in from the United States by natives who had emigrated to our country, contracted consumption, and brought it back home. The Syrians had no idea what it meant, and it rapidly spread. The sanitary conditions of this part of the world are bad, the bacteria breed rapidly, and the disease is sweeping the country.
And this brings me to a great work at Juneau within a few miles of Beirut. This is a tuberculosis hospital built there by the Church of the Covenant at Washington, and in charge of Dr. Mary Eddy, who has become famous throughout the Near East for her work as a medical missionary. Miss Eddy is the daughter of the Rev. William W. Eddy, who came to Syria many years ago and remained here until his death. Besides being a woman of fine education and great medical skill, she is an expert on all matters connected with tuberculosis and its treatment.
Cradles in Armenia have no sides, a wide cloth band drawn tight keeping the baby from falling out
American flour sacks serve a double purpose among the Armenians and Syrians in time of distress
Much of the wilderness of the Jordan will be reclaimed by irrigation and forestation when the British-Zionist project for developing water power along the river is completed
She is the only woman who has ever been granted an irade, or certificate of protection, from the Sultan authorizing her to practise as a doctor everywhere throughout his dominions and directing that all good Turks shall give her assistance as she goes on her way.
Miss Eddy has been working in Syria for years and has been fighting the spread of consumption as best she could without any hospital facilities for her patients. The people have come and camped near her house waiting treatment, and the tents of the Bedouins may be seen dotting the plains near where the hospital now is. Some of the best known men and women of our national capital have been interested in the building of this hospital and the support of its work.