In England, between 1900 and 1910, there was a growing
dissatisfaction among the rank and file with political action,
despite the fact that the influence of the Labour party in the
House of Commons secured the trade-union movement freedom
of industrial and political action by the Trades Disputes Act of
1906 and the Trade Union Act of 1913 to a greater degree than
ever before, it was felt by the far-sighted among the rank and file
that a speeding up was necessary, and State collectivism as a way
out towards industrial democracy was discredited. James
Connolly, the Irish Labour leader who was executed after the
Easter rising in Ireland in 1916, started a similar organization to
that of Daniel de Leon on the Clyde in 1905. In his pamphlet
Socialism made Easy he enunciated the syndicalist principles
" that they who rule industrially will rule politically," and that
" the functions of Industrial Unionism is to build up an industrial
republic inside the shell of the political slate, in order that when
the industrial republic is fully organized it may crack the shell of
the political slate and step into its place in the scheme of the uni-
verse." Tom Mann, while in France and Australia, which had im-
ported the ideas of the I.W.W. from America, was also powerfully
influenced by the same theories, while on the Rand, in S. Africa, a
small but very influential group of leaders was working out the
structure, forms and policy of a movement similarin character. In
1910 Tom Mann preached the new faith in all the big industrial
centres and rapidly won many followers. Workmen had refused to
follow their orthodox leaders from about 1008, as they felt that
the trade union of the old Liberal-Labour school was behind the
times. The Plebs League was founded by a group of labour
students in Ruskin College, Oxford, about the same time, and
in 1909 these seceded from Ruskin College and founded first
a labour college in Oxford and then moved to London as the
Central Labour College, financed by the S. Wales miners and
the railwaymen. This educational movement organized classes
in every .mining area in S. Wales, led by tutors from these
two colleges, and influenced largely by the new ideas. A
similar movement took place on the Clyde, in the great ship-
building centres like Barrow, Birkenhead, and Pembroke Dock,
and also in inland engineering centres like Coventry and Shef-
field. Then followed the railway strike of 1911 and the great
coal strike of 1912. It is quite clear that the National Union of
Railwaymen and the Miners' Federation of Great Britain became
organized as two of the most powerful unions in consequence of
the new thought, not because their leaders had adopted syndi-
calism in the form taught by de Leon and the French group of



thinkers, but because they adapted it in the peculiar British way;
they made it practical and definite; they shaped it in alliance
with the political and trade-union structure of Britain. They
disagreed with the syndicalist view of the State, but they recog-
nized the driving power of the theories that stated " that political
power is a reflex of industrial power." The transport workers
soon had a similar federation, and after the strikes of 1911 and
1912, and the Irish transport workers' strike of 1913, the Triple
Alliance (of railwaymen, transport workers, and miners) was
formed in 1915. The failure of this last to function during the
miners' strike in the spring of 1921 discredited " direct action,"
and the British labour movement swung back towards constitu-
tional and parliamentary methods.

See J. A. Estey, Revolutionary Syndicalism (1913); L. Levine,
Syndicalism in France (and ed. 1914) ; G. D. H. Cole, Self-Govern-
ment in Industry (3rd ed. 1918), The World of Labour (1919), Labour
in the Commonwealth (1919), Introduction to Trade Unionism (1918);
S. and B. Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1920) ; H. Lagardelle,
Le socialisme ouvrier (1911); J. R. Macdonald, Syndicalism (1912);
John Sparfjo, Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism (1920) ;
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (6th ed. 1920);
Arthur Gleason, What the Workers Want (1920); The Industrial
Council for the Building, Industry 1919 (Garton Foundation) ; G. D. H.
Cole, Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920) ; J. Graham Brooke, American
Syndicalism (1913); P. F. Brissenden, The I. W. W. (1919); James
Connolly, Socialism made Easy (1905); N. Ablett, The Miners' next
Step (1912); A Plan for the Democratic Control of the Mining Indus-
try (South Wales Socialist Society, 1919); J. T. Murphy, The
Workers' Committee (1918). (S. H.; J. M. R.)

SYNGE, JOHN MILLINGTON (1871-1909), Irish dramatic
author, came of an Anglo-Irish family, which had contributed
several bishops to the Irish church. He was born near Dublin
April 16 1871. A delicate child, he was left much to himself,
and as a youthful member of the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club
took long rambles over the Dublin and Wicklow hills. At Tririity
College, where he graduated in 1892, he obtained prizes in Irish
and Hebrew, and he knew something of several modern languages.
At this period his chief interest was in music and he gained
a scholarship in counterpoint and harmony in the Royal Irish
Academy of Music. A sonnet, moreover, contributed to Kot-
tabos, shows not a little of the accomplishment of verse, as well
as his innate passion for primitive things. During the next
few years (1893-8), Synge travelled in Germany, Austria, Italy,
finally making Paris his headquarters. He managed to spend a
third of the year in Paris, a third in the W. of Ireland, and a
third in London or Dublin. W. B. Yeats found him in Paris
(1898) preoccupied with theories of language and literature, and
advised him to return to Ireland. He went to the Aran Is.,
where he shared the life of the islanders, and he gave an account
of it in a series of sketches afterwards collected in the volume,
The Aran Islands (1907). In these and other sketches of the
same period he had not quite shaken off the obsession of " styl-
ism," and still had a wish " to do for the W. of Ireland what
Pierre Loti had done for the Bretons." Gradually, however,
Ireland got hold of him, and, turning to the dramatization of
incidents in the life he now knew intimately, he began to
elaborate, partly from his note-books and partly from the writings
of Lady Gregory and Dr. Douglas Hyde, that richly imaginative
though largely artificial dialect of Anglo-Irish which he carried
to its furthest capacities. The Abbey theatre was opened
towards the close of 1904, with Synge as one of the directors.
He had already produced two one-act plays, In the Shadow of
the Glen and Riders to the Sea (1903), of which the first had ac-
quired some notoriety for the author as an affront to Irish morals;
he had also written a farcical play, The Tinker's Wedding,
which proved a failure when acted (1909) after his death. The
beautiful three-act play, The Well of the Saints, produced before
a few dozen people in the early months of the Abbey (1905),
was regarded as a new affront; and in Jan. 1907, rumour having
got about of its subject matter, the performance of The Playboy
of the Western World was interrupted by an organized disturbance
which continued night after night for a week. This affair, when
the merits of the play came to be known, made the fame of the
Abbey theatre. Synge's health was now shattered, and with



SYRIA



653



death in prospect he worked at his fine play Delrdre of the
Sorrows, all but completing it before the end came on March 24
1909. Just before he had collected his curious Poems (1900).

Synge appeared at a peculiar moment in the development of
Irish literature, which had begun to address a largely increased
public, blended of the two main elements of the population. By
descent and culture he was of the Anglo-Irish stock, and he really
saw the Irish subject matter in the detached spirit of an artist.
It was probably something like this that part of his audience
detected in the Playboy, and it caused his work for a while
to be rejected in his own country. Time, however, has already
proved the depth of Synge's injight into the soul of peasant
Ireland. The Playboy is by general consent his masterpiece.
In this play, the fantastically rich imagery of his dialogue, which
elsewhere has often a somewhat monotonous effect, has full
dramatic justification; the play has even, like Hamlet, the
supreme mark of vitality, that it conveys the suggestion of a
permanent human enigma. There are good critics, however,
who assign the highest place among his works to Deirdre.

A collected edition of Synge's works, in four volumes, was published
in 1910. In John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913), M.
Maurice Bourgeois has given, in great detail, an account of his life
and writings; and there is a critical study of him by P. P. Howe
(1912). (W. K. M.)

SYRIA (see 26.305). The greater part of the decade 1911-21
was a period of depression and distress in Syria, which, in common
with the rest of the Ottoman Empire of which it then formed
part, suffered from the interruption of commerce and the war-
time exactions consequent upon the Italo-Turkish, the Balkan
and the World Wars in an almost unbroken succession from 1911
until 1918. Although only for a brief time an actual theatre of
hostilities, Syria, which had escaped with a slight bombardment
of Beirut in Feb. 1912 during which a Turkish gun-boat was
sunk in the harbour by an Italian squadron, was particularly
exposed to military requisitions and exactions.

Even before the entry of Turkey into the World War involved
the Levant ports in a fresh blockade (Nov. 1914) the coastal
population had begun to migrate inland from fear of enemy
landings, and the whole country was disorganized by the pressure
of refugees on the one hand and of the military preparations for
an invasion of Egypt on the other, while the civil population
was much excited by the shameless propaganda conducted by
German agents who sought to inflame Moslem prejudice against
Christians all over the country. The Minister of Marine, Ahmad
Jemal Pasha, who was also in command of the IV. Army and
governor-general, conducted the government of the province in
such a way as to give rise during a long period to the suspicion
that he aimed at imitating Mehemet All in founding for himself
a semi-independent viceroy alty; and his autocratic exactions
and high-handed measures did much to pave the way for the final
revolt against Turkish authority, which caused its collapse
when the battles in Palestine in Sept. 1918 had broken the front.

In the subsequent operations Syria was overrun rather than
conquered. Damascus fell to the British and Arabs on Oct. i,
Tyre was taken by the British on Oct. 4, Beirut was seized by a
French squadron on Oct. 5 and occupied on Oct. 7 by British
troops, which took Horns on Oct. 16, Tripoli (Tarabulus) on
Oct. 1 8, Kama on Oct. 21, while the Arabs took Aleppo on Oct.
25 and the French occupied Alexandretta on Nov. 10.

Immediately after the liberation of Syria Gen. Allenby set up
an administration of Occupied Enemy Territory in accordance
with "the Laws and Usages of War" laid down by international
agreements embodied in the Hague Convention. In order to
comply as far as possible with the divergent policies to which
the British Government had committed itself he confided those
areas which had been liberated chiefly by Arab troops to " O.E.
T.A. East," with Arab administrators under a chief administra-
tor at Damascus 'Ali Riza Pasha er Rikabi, while the Lebanon,
the littoral N. of the Ladder of Tyre, and as far as Bab Yunis N.
of Alexandretta, was under Col. P. de Piepape as chief admin-
istrator O.E.T.A. North in Beirut with French officers. Later,
when Cilicia was occupied in conformity with the Armistice




which came into effect on Nov. i O.E.T.A. in Beirut became
O.E.T.A. West and Cilicia was controlled by a new O.E.T.A.
North under the French Col. Breraond.

From the very first the French had considerable difficulties
to face, as Arab Nationalism and the idea of Syrian independence
based upon the doctrine of self-determination both greatly
influenced the civil population, which was, moreover, puzzled
in that French officers were engaged in administering the country
on French lines and conducting a French propaganda, when it
was notorious that British troops had liberated the country and
were still occupying a great part of it, and that the Arab admin-
istration in Damascus was anxious to lean on the British alliance
and to ignore as far as possible the existence of the Sykes-Picot
Agreement which had divided the country into arbitrarily
defined spheres of influence regardless of the claims of the Arabs.
Colonel de Piepape was, moreover, much hampered by the limited
selection of French officers from whom he had to pick his
administrators. Furthermore, Syria being a comparatively rich
and civilized part of the Ottoman Empire and inhabited almost
entirely by non-Turks had been particularly exposed to the
exactions of the Turkish army and Government, and her popula-
tion had been greatly exhausted by military conscription,
political deportations, voluntary flight of refugees and by the
ravages of locusts, starvation and disease. Yet Syria was unable
to benefit to any great degree from the presence of the British
army, as had Palestine; few military roads were made except
the remarkable rock-cut carriage-way across the face of the
Ladder of Tyre (Ras en Naqura) which was made by Sir Valentine
Fane's yth Indian Div. little local labour was employed, and
charitable contributions for the help of the civil population of
Syria were the less readily forthcoming as it had none of the
religious and sentimental glamour attaching to the Holy Land.

With the withdrawal of the British Army of Occupation from
O.E.T.A. North and West which began on Nov. 4 1919 and
ended on Jan. 19 1920 the difficulties of the French were greatly
enhanced, as their own troops were hardly numerous enough to
cope with the forces of disorder which began to raise their heads
almost immediately. Attempts to enforce French authority
were met with armed resistance. Certain of their agents played
them false, and both in Cilicia and Syria Gen. Gouraud, who
had become High Commissioner in Beirut in Oct. 1919, had to
cope at once with Turkish Nationalist plots directed from
Angora, panislamic agitation, anti-Armenian traditional hatred
and Syrian and Arab Nationalism. Active troubles soon began,
the Damascus administration, now controlled by the Emir
Faisal, had little real authority over the semi -independent tribes
which were plentifully supplied with rifles, either issued to them
for war against the Turks, or captured weapons, and it was itself
harassed by the conflicting policies of the Syrian extremists who
resented the presence of the Arab " Patriarchalists " from the
desert, and of the Hejaz Arabs who maintained that Syria was but
a province conquered by them in war and lawfully at their
disposal. The Emir had, moreover, to keep the peace with his
French and British allies in the face of a growing anti-European
spirit which was hostile to the French schemes for controlling
Syria and indignant at the British attitude towards the Jews,
while Syrian Nationalists resented the partition of the country
between two foreign Powers and inclined towards anybody even
the once hated Turks who offered hopes of driving the Euro-
peans into the sea.

Baalbek was the scene of the first fighting between the
French and Arabs at Christmas 1919. In Jan. 1920 the French
were attacked near Quneitera and in the Merj lyun. Later
in the month their troops were engaged in the Latakia (Ladigiye)
district, and while they were able to recover Baalbek before (he
end of Jan. their garrison at Alexandretta was attacked in Feb.
On March i the Jewish colony at Tell Hai, near Metulla, in what
was then the French sector of Upper Galilee, was raided by
Arabs. On March 8 the Syrian National Congress, sitting in Da-
mascus, under the influence of impatient extremists, proclaimed
the Emir Faisal as King of Syria, and placed him in an extreme-
ly difficult diplomatic position. In the face of the extremists he



654



SYRIA



was unable to hold back, and he organized a Syrian Cabinet
under Riza Pasha and did his best to enforce discipline through-
out his dominions where compulsory military service had been
reintroduced on Dec. 21 1919. The authority of Damascus was,
however, unable to restrain the outbreak of Arab Nationalist
enthusiasm which the formation of the kingdom of Syria aroused.
Antioch was taken from its small French garrison on March 20,
there was anti-European trouble from the Amanus to Jerusalem
(see PALESTINE) , and Arab officers entered into renewed relations
with the Nationalist Turks of Angora. As early as Dec. u 1919
Ramadhan ibn Shalash, the Arab governor of Raqqa, instigated
by Angora, had made common cause with a Kurdish freebooter,
Ibrahim Pasha Milli, and had attacked Deir ez Zor, from which,
although hi the French sphere of influence, the British had not
yet withdrawn. The Emir Faisal immediately dismissed Ramad-
han, but he became contumacious, declined any longer to
recognize the authority of Damascus and openly adhered to the
Nationalist Turks. His Arab successor in Raqqa, Maulud Pasha,
was equally disloyal, and throughout the summer disturbances
in both French and British areas were actively fomented by him
and other disobedient adherents of the Damascus Government.
More vigorous steps were taken by the Nationalist Turks
of Angora. Not content with conducting a campaign of ex-
termination against the Armenians in Cilicia where the French
were not strong enough militarily to occupy the whole province
in the face of the formidable Turkish forces operating against
them and the Armenians, the Government of Angora invaded
northern Syria itself. Aintab was attacked in strength on April i

1920. It was relieved by a French column with some difficulty
on April 15-16, but, when the relieving troops were withdrawn
on April 28, the siege was resumed on April 30. It was relieved a
second time on May 22, and an armistice was concluded on May
29 by which the French evacuated the citadel and established
themselves in a fresh position. They were again attacked by the
Turks and relieved for a third time on Aug. n. This time the
French were strong enough to attack in their turn, although un-
able entirely to invest the Turks, who had occupied the citadel as
part of their position. After long-drawn operations, during which
the Turkish mines in one of the piers of the great bridge of the
Bagdad railway over the Euphrates at Jerablus were exploded
by lightning and two spans of the bridge wrecked, the French
were successful, and Aintab was once more made safe on Feb. 10

1921. During this period its pop. is supposed to have decreased
by some two-thirds to 25,000. Nor were the disturbances in
the N. confined to the Aintab area, apart from the campaign
in Cilitia. Nationalist Turks and Syrians at the beginning of
Dec. raided as far S. as Jebele on the coast 14 m. S. of Latakia,
and farther E. a force of Nationalist Turks established themselves
near the newly fixed boundary between Syria and Mesopotamia
and tried to stir up unrest among the desert tribes.

In the S. the existence of an independent state at Damascus
with Nationalist aspirations to absorb all Syria and the Lebanon,
and unwilling to admit French influence or recognize any French
mandate, was likely to prove an uneasy neighbour the more
so as the Emir Faisal had declined on two occasions (March 27
and May 8) to repair to Paris at the invitation of the Allies to
explain the situation. The Emir maintained that it was only by
remaining at Damascus that he could hope to restrain the more
extreme Nationalists from launching a wholesale attack upon
French territory. As soon, therefore, as Gen. Gouraud had an
adequate force at his command with which to enforce the
authority given to France as Mandatory for Syria on behalf of the
League of Nations, he made ready to impose it upon Damascus,
when in June 1920 the Emir Faisal was beset by difficulties.
Himself one of the Ashraf, a son of the King of the Hejaz, he
found it increasingly difficult to restrain the Nationalist Syrians,
the pro-Turk panislamists and the Patriarchalist tribesmen
who were traditionally hostile to any authority which sought to
stand between them and their prey in the cultivated lands. In
June the Cabinet of Riza Pasha fell, largely on the question
of the relations between Syria and the Europeans particularly
the French, and Hashim Bey Attassi took office. At that time



in the discussions of the budget in the French Chamber it appeared
that France, while proposing to allot some 3,700,000 for the :
expenses of the High Commissionership of Syria and some
440,000 for propaganda to be directed against the extremist
doctrines of those opposed to her rule, was ready to grant a
subvention of 800,000 to the Emir Faisal provided that he co-
operated whole-heartedly in the execution of the Mandate.
The Emir was, however, in no position to do so, owing to the
intractability of the Nationalist leaders who threatened to depose
or murder him if he ventured to abate in any way from the extreme i
of their ambitions, wholly incompatible wi th any foreign Mandate.
At the same time the economic situation of Syria was bad, and the
taxes were extremely high for example, the camel tax in Syria
was 3 (3 is. 6d.) per beast as against i rupee (is. 4d.) per
beast in Mesopotamia, and the sheep tax was 36 P.T. (75.)
against 8 annas (Sd.) and were, moreover, farmed, owing to the
absence of the necessary fiscal machinery for ensuring official
collection. Thus the Emir's Government was regarded with sus-
picion by the Nationalists and those who were opposed to any
accommodation with France, or indeed any European Power.

On July 14 1920 Gen. Gouraud informed the Emir that French
authority was to be enforced and that he would assume control
of the Syrian railways hitherto run by the Arab administration,
parts of which had not been working since January. This in-
timation was none too soon, as it was known that the Arab general,
Rushdi Bey, in command of the 3rd Arab Div. and governor of
Aleppo, who had formerly been in the Ottoman service, was in
active communication with the Nationalist Turks of Angora for
the purpose of arranging joint operations against the French.
Almost at the same time Gen. Gouraud found it necessary to
arrest nine members of the Administrative Council of the Lebanon,
apparently for conspiring with Syrian Nationalists to make it
impossible for France to exercise her Mandate.

The Emir Faisal was willing to comply with Gen. Gouraud's
wishes, but the Syrian Nationalists, miscalculating their strength,
opposed the advance of Gen. Goybct's column which was sent
to occupy Damascus. They even attacked the Emir Faisal,
delayed the final message of submission sent by the Emir and
his Cabinet to Gen. Goybet, and by ill-judged hostilities com-
pelled the French to defeat them smartly at Khan Meisehm
on the road through the mountains N.W. of Damascus on
July 24, and to enter that city next day as conquerors rather
than as protecting allies, thus bringing about the downfall of the
Emir, whom the French held responsible for the resistance of the
Nationalists although it had been offered in defiance of his
authority and policy. The Emir's last Cabinet fell with him,
and the French, who inflicted a fine of 8500,000 (10,000,000
frs.) upon the country, caused a new administration to be formed
under 'Ala ed Din er Rubi, while the Emir Faisal and his family
withdrew from Damascus on July 28, going to Haifa, where he
remained until Aug. 4, when he left for Europe.

The suppression of the Nationalists at Damascus did not
immediately bring peace to the country, as the French were unable
adequately to control the Hauran, and on Aug. 20 Bedouin
raiders stopped a train at Khirbet el Ghazali on the Hcjaz
railway and murdered the Syrian prime minister 'Ala ed Din er
Rubi, Ata el Ayyubi, the Minister of the Interior, and 'Abdur-
rahman Yusuf, President of the Council of State; for some
time afterwards railway communication was hazardous in that
area, and trains were generally protected by a guard of soldiers
in armoured trucks at either end.

On Sept. i 1920 Beirut became an autonomous district of
the Greater Lebanon (Grand Liban) , which was enlarged from its
former extent under the Turks so as to embrace all Biqa' or the