The free license allowed to men by the Koran in the beating of their wives, has led the entire population of the East to set a low estimate upon the life of woman.  Until recently in Syria women were poisoned, thrown down wells, beaten to death, or cast into the sea, and the government made no inquisition into the matter.  According to Mohammedan law, a prosecution for murder must always be commenced by the friends of the victim, and if they do not enter complaint, or furnish witnesses, the murderer is not even arrested.  And if he be convicted of the crime, he is released on paying to the relatives of the victim the price of blood, which is fixed at 13,000 piastres, or $520!  A man may well “count the cost” before committing murder.  This constant compounding of punishment has degraded the popular views of the value of human life, so that formerly the murder of a woman was never punished.  In March, 1856, a Druze girl near B’hamdun married a man of her own choice, instead of marrying the man assigned to her by her family.  She was waylaid by her own brother and the rejected suitor, murdered and thrown into a well.

About a year after the massacres of 1860, while the European Commissioners were still in Syria, and Lebanon was beginning to attain something of its wonted quiet, several Turkish soldiers made an assault upon a young Maronite girl from the village of Ain Kesur, who was carrying a jar of water to the workmen on the Deir el Komr road.  Mr. Calhoun was requested by the Relief Committee in Beirut to devote the charity funds distributed in this part of Lebanon, to giving employment to the needy in road-building.  This girl was employed to supply the men with water.  The brutal soldiers attempted to gag her with a handkerchief, in order to accomplish their design, but she was too strong for them.  The struggle was long and violent, but she finally effected her escape, leaving on the road the fragments of the broken jar, her shoes and shreds of calico which they had torn from her clothing.  Just at that moment Giurgius el Haddad, Mr. Calhoun’s cook, came up, and seeing the broken jar and the clothing, guessed what had happened, and after finding the girl, and hearing her story, started in pursuit of the soldiers to Ainab, whither they had gone, and where a Turkish officer was stationed.  He stated the case to the officer, and received in reply a blow on his arm from a heavy cane.  The case was reported to the Turkish Colonel in Abeih, who summoned all parties and ordered each of the soldiers to be beaten with forty lashes on the bare back.  But word had reached Col.  Frazier, the British Commissioner, and he came at once to Abeih in company with Omar Pasha, with order from Evad, Pasha, to examine the case de novo.  The result was that two of the soldiers were condemned by military law to be shot, and were shot at sunset June 5th, in front of the old palace just below Mr. Calhoun’s house.  The event produced a profound impression, and Druzes and Moslems began to feel that a woman’s life and honor were after all of some value.