By 1860 there had come into existence little groups of officials, officers and teachers, alive to the importance of reforming the structure of the empire, and convinced this could not be done unless some at least of the forms of European society were borrowed. The reforming group in Constantinople included few if any Arabs at this time, but the great proclamations of reform and the laws which resulted from them had an influence all over the empire, and Ottoman officials of the new way of thought held positions in the Arab as in other provinces. In Egypt men with some amount of French education were already filling important posts, and in 1863 one of them, Isma‘il Pasha, came to the throne; in Tunis too the leader of the young reformers, Khayr al-Din, was beginning to be important in the affairs of the State. The Christian students of the mission schools in Lebanon and Syria were unable to play so direct a part in the government of what after all was still an Islamic State, but they already had some indirect influence as interpreters in the local governments and foreign consulates, and in the 1860's were to acquire a new power as the first journalists of the Arab world.