Pan-Islam Part 7

To meet him and his family on trek is to glimpse an epitome of his life.

First comes the able-bodied though elderly sire carrying a few light throwing-spears and a k.n.o.bkerry or a gim-crack stabbing-spear, and close behind him are the adult males of his house similarly armed or with a rifle or two supplied by a benevolent Government for protection against the Mullah, to whom these children of nature frequently offer them for sale at very reasonable prices. After these come the women-folk in order of precedence, carrying loads in inverse ratio thereto. The young, favourite wife walks first, carrying her latest addition to the family in a cotton shawl at her hip; she is followed by other wives of less social standing, carrying household utensils, with the smaller children at foot, and at the tail of the procession stagger the old crones under heavy burdens of pots, pans, pitchers and unsavoury goat-hair rugs. A camel or two bring up the rear with the conglomeration of sticks and hides and matting which makes the home and looks like an untidy bird's nest. On the flanks and in the rear skirmish the elder children, girls and boys, with flocks and herds which graze as they go. The big piebald sheep with their black heads and indecently fat tails are not allowed to range far afield, where lynx or leopard might stalk them under covert, as they are valuable, succulent and very foolish. They carry no wool--their coat feels just like a fox-terrier's--but they have more meat on them than three average goats, and the huge pendulous flap of fat which does duty as a tail is a delicacy to make a Somali mouth water or a European gorge rise.

The only serious occupation a buck Somali will permit himself is to sit under a tree and watch his grazing flocks. He is fond of conversation, chiefly of a recriminative character, and gives vent to his _joie de vivre_ by prancing and singing on two or three simple notes to the accompaniment of his clapping hands and the thud of his h.o.r.n.y heels. His chief woe is drought and lack of grazing, because he then has to get up off his b.u.t.t-end and take long treks to pastures new. His ideas of earthly Paradise centre round the _cafes_ of Aden, where his countrymen are numerous and where wages are so high that six grown Somalis can batten in well-fed ease on the earnings of a seventh, who keeps on till he wants a holiday and then "goes sick" and sends another of the syndicate to replace him. Qualifications do not matter, as they all have sufficient to fumble through their jobs and no more. If he lacks the capital to start cab-driving and finds boat-rowing or punkah-pulling too strenuous for him, he sets himself to learn a little English and gets a job as servant with some new-fledged British subaltern at a minimum rate of 2 a month, which is fixed by his union, for that is one civilised device he really _can_ handle. He is the slackest oarsman, the laziest punkawala and the worst whip east of Suez. His idea of driving is to sit with knees drawn up toward his chin while he lugs at the reins as if they were a punkah-cord, urging his staunch little screw along with ineffectual flaps of his whip and noises like the paroxysms of sea sickness.

He will ruin any saddle-camel for fast work if allowed to ride one regularly, such animals not being raised in his country, but he breeds a small, hardy type of pony which he loves to gallop in wild dashes, with flapping legs and sawing hands, reining the poor little beast up short on a bit like a rat-trap to witch beholders with his horsemans.h.i.+p.

As a combatant you never know how to take him. He may put up a hefty fight or he may outrun the antelope in his precipitate retreat. I was much impressed by the defences in barbed wire and thorn trees considered necessary to ward off the onslaught of dervishes by men who knew them better than I did.

He is a cheery, irresponsible soul and has been called the Irishman of the East. Missionaries rather like him, because he is very teachable up to a certain point, fond of learning new tricks if not too difficult, and without that habit of logical and consecutive thought which makes the real Arab so difficult to tackle in argument.

No remarks on Somaliland would be complete without some mention of the Mullah. That astute personage has often been alluded to as "Mad," but has proved himself far saner than the Government he was up against. In the early 'nineties he kept the Arabi Pasha coffee-house opposite the cab-stand in the native town at Aden, where he dispensed tea and husk-coffee in little bowls of green-glazed earthenware, also raspberryade and other bright-coloured "minerals" in bottles, with a small lump of ice thrown in. His establishment was patronised almost entirely by Somalis and largely by the _ghari-walas_ themselves. At the same time, he was obliging enough to spare the servant of a neighbouring sahib like myself a pound or two of ice from his "cold box" on occasional application to meet an emergency.

He had a good deal of property in flocks and herds over in British Somaliland, which he visited from time to time. In the late 'nineties he got involved in some suit or other and the local authorities mulcted him of many camels. He very much resented this decision and raised some friends and sympathisers to resist its execution by the police. An inadequate force was sent and sustained a reverse, after which his following grew enormously. Early in this century, when I again had news of him, he had craftily cut in between the Italian, Abyssinian and British converging columns and annihilated Colonel Plunkett's gallant little band at Gumburu, but sustained a severe defeat at Jidballi, where his red flannel dressing-gown was sighted in early and headlong retirement as his dervishes recoiled from the embattled square.

All the same, he was still going strong long after the South African War was over, and we had more leisure to attend to him. When the British frontier was drawn in to enable the statement to be made in Parliament that "the Mullah's troops were no longer within protectorate limits," he took advantage of it to deal ruthlessly with those tribes which had refused to join him on the solemn and definite promise that Government would protect them from his vengeance. The unhappy Dolbahuntas were almost wiped out as a tribal unit; their zarebas and flimsy villages were surrounded by the Mullah's men and fired, leaving the occupants--men, women and children--the choice of a dreadful end among blazing thorns or red death on the spears of their fellow-countrymen and co-religionists. A prominent Nationalist has alluded to the Mullah and his dervishes as "brave men striving to be free."

In 1910 British prestige had shed its last rag in Somaliland: we had withdrawn to the coast and the Mullah's hors.e.m.e.n actually rode through Berbera bazar on one of their raids and withdrew unscathed. In 1912 it was found necessary to form a company of Somali police on camels to keep the peace between "friendlies" who, to allay a certain amount of indignation at home, had been armed with rifles to protect themselves against the Mullah's people, but were using these weapons, in their light-hearted way, to argue questions of grazing as they arose. Early in 1913 "a small dervish outpost" was reported to be preventing our friendlies from grazing in the Ain valley south of Burao at a time when no other pasturage was locally available, and the Somali camel-corps, about a hundred strong with three white officers, was sent to occupy Burao as its base and from there to afford moral and material support enabling the friendlies to graze unmolested in the threatened area. This cheery opportunism was the Government's wobbling attempt at equilibrium between the barefaced desertion of our protected tribes and its avowed policy of non-intervention unless on the cheap. It was done too much on the cheap; that little force was attacked by an overwhelming force of dervishes while out on the grazing grounds affording moral and material support. The Maxim was put out of action by an unlucky bullet, and the friendlies skedaddled with their Government rifles at the first shot, but returned later to loot the dead. The half-trained Somali camelry suffered severely and were most unsteady, but the two white officers surviving managed to extricate the remnant with difficulty, the gallant commandant having died for his trust early in the fight. He was blamed posthumously for having exceeded his orders; whether he ought to have exercised his moral and material support at a safe distance from the place where it was needed or have led his command in headlong flight was not made clear, and they were the only two military alternatives to the action he _did_ take. At all events the incident shamed the Government into taking more adequate measures to protect its friendlies in spite of bitter Nationalist opposition.

Missionaries point to our long and fruitless struggle in Somaliland as an ill.u.s.tration of the force of fanaticism. It is nothing of the sort; the Mullah was a man with a grievance who was driven into outlawry by the sequence of events, and the movement was entirely political. Having once tasted the sweets of temporal power, he wanted to expand it, and used his spiritual and material influence to that end, not hesitating to order the wholesale ma.s.sacre of other equally orthodox Moslems when it seemed to him politically expedient. He owed his success to his ruthless treatment of his compatriots, the difficult and scantily watered terrain, our lack of co-ordination with the Italians and Abyssinians, but above all to our parsimonious method of cadging and sc.r.a.ping a little money together for an expedition and stopping when the funds gave out, like a small boy with fireworks. Somaliland, with its insignificant caravan trade, its wide, waterless tracts and its spa.r.s.e population of s.h.i.+ftless, unproductive semi-nomads, is a bad business proposition, and no Government can be blamed for hesitating to spend money on it; but if half the expenditure had been concentrated on one scheme at one time instead of being frittered away on several divergent schemes over a lengthy period the Mullah would have been brought to book and the resources of the country developed considerably.

South of Somaliland in British, and what was once German, East Africa the missionary has comparative freedom of movement, whereas in Somaliland no white man has ever been allowed to travel without the sanction of the local authorities. He, however, complains that he is not encouraged by the Administration in either colony, and certainly makes no headway against Islam, which has a very strong hold, especially in British East Africa, with the Swahilis. Still, he can point to the inland kingdom of Uganda as one of his successes, and it would be more so if the various Christian sects would refrain from wrangling among themselves.

We have now reached the southern limit of Moslem activity in Africa, for we are getting among native races who do not take kindly to asceticism in any form, and beyond them are the st.u.r.dy white Christians of South Africa. Curiously enough, there is a flouris.h.i.+ng little colony of Moslems at Salt River, the railway suburb of Cape Town, where imported East Indian and Arab mechanics have settled. They muster about 7,000 souls and have founded a school to educate their children. An unbia.s.sed English resident states that they are far better citizens than native Christians of the same cla.s.s, owing to their temperate habits. Drink is the undoubted curse of the non-Moslem African. In South Africa no native in white employ can get alcoholic drink without the written authority of his employer, but there are many illicit sources of supply. South African colonists insist that the native Christians are the worst--this should not be set down to Christianity, but to the civilisation which goes with it, and, in place of Kaffir beer and such like home-fermented brews of comparatively mild exhilarant character, introduces the undisciplined native mind to the furious joys of trade fire-water.

Africa is the main battle-ground between Moslem and missionary, for it is in that continent that the forces of Islam and Christianity are most nearly balanced. The American Protestant Mission, which is, as we have seen, one of the princ.i.p.al belligerents, complains loudly on behalf of Christendom that in Africa especially our colonial administrations do not give the support to Christian missions that Christian Governments should.

Apart from the fact that we administer these countries in trust for their indigenous population and have no right to thrust our own creed upon them to the exclusion of any other with a sound system of ethics, it can most cogently be urged that Islam is the only religion which insists on total abstinence, and that seems to be the only way in which the native African can avoid alcoholic excess.

I have in front of me a letter written by an American of Boston, Ma.s.s., to the _Spectator_ of February 15th, 1919. In it he alludes to a report of the Committee for preventing the demoralisation of native races by the liquor traffic which is said to be "making Africa a cesspool of alcohol, and statistics show that in this devil's work Holland with her gin and, I regret to say, the United States with its trade rum have been the conspicuously worst offenders." The writer goes on to say that the native races are morally and intellectually children, and that has been recognised in the States where it is a penal offence to introduce alcoholic drink within the Indian reservations.

This being so, the att.i.tude of American Protestants in attacking the only teetotal creed which is working among natives in a continent where total abstinence is unanimously declared to be essential to native welfare indicates loose thinking. It is still more extraordinary when we remember that the teetotal party in the United States have moved heaven and earth and every device, legitimate or otherwise, to secure national prohibition, about which, to put it mildly, there appear to be two opinions among American citizens. We are told that the South adopted prohibition as a measure of protection against the negro. Apart from the safety of white colonists in Africa, is the welfare of African negroes beneath the consideration of a free-born American? If so, why does he (or she) subscribe so liberally to support missions in Africa? Such an att.i.tude is incongruous, even if we adopt the preposterous view that Christianity alone can make a sober man of a negro. Imagine a munic.i.p.ality which allowed a gang of hooligans to scatter incendiary bombs broadcast and encouraged its inadequate fire brigade to fight a rival organisation tooth and nail. Its avowed intention of prohibiting the use of matches on its own premises would not be considered a satisfactory _amende_.

I lay no more stress on American Protestant activities against Islam than is their due. There may be some opinions among Europeans that their evangelising fervour might find a mission field nearer home in South America or even in Mexico. Such a criticism is not only ungrateful but unreasonable. American missions have done much for humanity in the East, while as regards their own sub-continent the Catholic Church has held that field for centuries, and no reasonable being wants to see the two great divisions of Christianity sparring with each other about the spiritual education of greasers.

The Monroe Doctrine does not apply to missionaries, but I would point out to them that in wrestling against Islam they are fanning the fires of fanaticism and causing much material trouble, and the net spiritual result is to lessen their own power for good and embitter Islam for ill while widening the breach between Christian and Moslem.

This chapter is an attempt to give an impartial glimpse at the relations between Moslem and missionary throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. With regard to their activities, it is neither a detailed account nor an apology. No sincere religious effort requires an apology, and if it is not sincere no apology suffices.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: The definite article precedes most Arabic place-names, but is only retained in ordinary local speech as above, presumably to denote respect. I hold to native p.r.o.nunciation, except in cases of long-established custom, and consider "the Yamen" as clumsy as "the Egypt"--both take the definite article in Arabian script.]

CHAPTER V

A PLEA FOR TOLERANCE

The world just now appears to be awaiting a millennium resulting from a concourse of more or less brilliant and a.s.sertive folk with divergent views. Presuming that the necessary change in human nature will be wrought by enactment, we have still to acquire more religious tolerance if we are to live together in unity with our Moslem fellow-subjects and neighbours.

What is the use of talking about a League of Nations and the self-decision of small States if we still seek to impose our religious views on people who do not want them and encroach on the borders of other creeds? Are other people's spiritual affairs of no account, or do we arrogate to ourselves a monopoly of such matters? Both positions are untenable.

The justification of missionary enterprise is based on Christ's last charge to His disciples: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." He clearly defined that gospel as "the tidings of the kingdom," and what that kingdom was He has repeatedly told us in the Sermon on the Mount, frequent conversations with His disciples and others and the example of His daily life. He never sought to change a man's religious belief (such as it was) or his method of livelihood (however questionable it might be), but to reform him within the limits of his convictions and his duties. He has also left on record an indictment of proselytisers that will endure for all time. Of course, if the Gospel narrative is unreliable throughout (as the reverend and scholarly compiler of the "Encyclopedia Biblica" would appear to imply) then these arguments fall to the ground, but so does any possible justification of missionary enterprise. On the other hand, Moslems _do_ believe and reverence the _Engil_ or Gospel, though they follow the doctrine and dogma of a later revelation.

The logical deduction from these facts is that moral training, education and charitable works among Moslems are permissible and justifiable features of missionary endeavour, if not forced upon an unwilling population, but attacks on Islam itself are not only unmerited but unauthorised and impertinent.

Many missionaries of undoubted scholars.h.i.+p and breadth of view see this and model their field work accordingly, with good results; in fact, most real success in the mission field has been achieved by practical, Christian work on the above lines, and not by religious propaganda; but the flag which missionary societies flaunt before a subscribing Christian public is quite a different banner, as can be easily ascertained from their own published literature, which is very prolific and accessible to all.

In writing about Islam the authors or compilers of these works too frequently allow their zeal to involve them in a web of inconsistency and misstatement, or else they let their religious terminology take liberties with their intellect and that of the public.

We will glance briefly at their indictment of Islam as presented in their quasi-geographical works, disregarding their public utterances and tracts as privileged, like the platform-speeches and vote-catching pamphlets of a General Election; also we will keep to their own terminology and expressions as far as possible.

First and foremost, especially in the United States, where knowledge of non-Christian creeds is not so general as with us, the literature of foreign missions insists on grouping together all regions as yet unexploited by them (whether populated by heathen, Moslems, Buddhists or any other non-Christian race) and describing them indiscriminately as Gibraltars of Satan's power, a challenge to Christendom and a reproach to Zion (whatever that may mean). Yet the four great Christian Churches--Greek, Russian, Catholic and Protestant--seem powerless to check the reign of h.e.l.l in Bolshevist Europe, where the liberty of man is demonstrated by murder, rapine, torture and every fiendish orgy or b.e.s.t.i.a.l l.u.s.t which mortal mind can conceive. The people among whom these devilries are being enacted are Christians ruled by Christians, and have been Christian for centuries. They are still Christian so far as a blood-besotted clique will let them be anything. And in the face of such facts there are missionaries who enunciate in cold print that without Christianity there could be no charitable or humane organisation of any sort, or good government, or security of property, and--clinching argument--trade would suffer. Could there be any more glaring example of the cart before the horse? Does a dog wag his tail or the tail wag the dog? Is j.a.pan hopelessly benighted and devoid of the activities described as the monopoly of Christianity? Moreover: Can Christian teaching or preaching pacify the embittered struggle between labour and capital which threatens yet to wreck civilisation? Does it even try?

There is no more ridiculous or extravagant boast among a certain cla.s.s of self-appointed evangelists than the oft-repeated statement that all the modern blessings of Western civilisation are the fruit of Christianity and that the backward state of oriental Moslems is due to the absence of Christianity.

Any thoughtful schoolboy knows that it was the exploitation of coal and iron which lifted us Western nations out of the ruck, backed by the natural hardihood due to a bracing climate, otherwise the Mediterranean might still be harried by corsairs. Steam transport by land and sea was the direct offspring of these two minerals. Even then Western supremacy was gradual and only recently completed by the exploitation of petroleum, rubber and high explosives. Brown Bess, as a shooting weapon, was far inferior to the long-barrelled flint-lock of Morocco, and the Arabian match-lock could out-range any firearm in existence till sharp cutting tools made the rifle possible. What does modern surgery, or any other science of accurate manipulation, not owe to modern steel? When we turn from metallurgy to medicine, let us not forget that Avicenna was writing his pharmacopoeia when Christian apothecaries were selling potions and philtres under the sign of a stuffed crocodile.

Some exponents of Christianity would go further and arrogate to her the inception of all arts and handicrafts. Damascus blades, Cordovan leather, Moorish architecture, Persian carpets, Indian filagree, Chinese carvings and j.a.panese paintings all give the lie to such claims.

If we are to measure Christianity by the material progress of her adherents, what conclusions are we to draw from the history of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Copts? Fourteen hundred years after the birth of Christianity in Palestine the fall of Constantinople shattered her last vestige of sovereignty in the East after she had gone through centuries of decadence, debauch and intrigue such as anyone can find recorded by Gibbon or even in historical novels like "Hypatia."

Islam, to-day, is about the same age as Christianity was then, and has gone through similar stages, except that it has been spared the intrigues of an organised priesthood and its comparative frugality has protected it from oriental enervation to a certain extent.

Compared with Western Christianity its present epoch coincides with the era preceding the Reformation, when religious teaching had become stereotyped and lacked vitality, as is now the case with Moslem teaching as a rule. There is no reason why Islam should not recover as Christianity did, and if it does not it will not be due to any intrinsic defect, but to its oriental environment, which has already debased and wrecked Eastern Christendom.

The respective ages of the two religions induces another comparison. We are now in the fourteenth century of the Hejira; glance at European Christendom of that period in the Christian era, or even much later, and reflect on the Sicilian Vespers, the Inquisition, the ma.s.sacre of the Huguenots, the atrocious witchfinders who served that pedantic Protestant prig, James I, and all the burnings, hackings and slayings perpetrated in the name of Christendom. We must admit that no Moslems anywhere, even in the most barbarous regions, are any worse than the Christians of those days, while the vast majority are infinitely better, viewed by any general standard of humanity. Christendom's only possible defence is that civilisation has influenced Christianity for good, and not the other way about. There is one other loophole which I, for one, refuse to crawl through--that Christianity is a greater moral force than Islam or more rapid in its action. Missionaries say that Islam is incapable of high ideals owing to its impersonal and inhuman conception of the Deity, whom it does not limit by any human standards of justice.

They complain that there is no fatherhood in the Moslem G.o.d; but--pursuing their own metaphor--what would an earthly father think if his acts of correction were criticised by his children from their own point of view? He might be angry, but would probably just smile, and I hope the Almighty does the same. A child thinks it most unjust to be rebuked or perhaps chastised for playing at trains with suitable noises at unsuitable seasons but it is that, and similar parental correction, which makes him become a decent member of society and not a self-centred nuisance.

Moslems shrink from applying _any_ human standards to the Deity, regarding Him as the Lord of the Universe and not a popularly-elected premier. "Whatever good is from G.o.d, whatever ill from thyself," is a Koranic aphorism. Nor do they seek to drive bargains with Him, as do many pious Christians, and their supplications are limited (as in our Lord's Prayer) to the bare necessities of life--food and water to support existence, and clothing to cover their nakedness.

The application of human ideals to the Almighty places Him on a level with Kipling's "wise wood-pavement G.o.ds" or the Teutonic conception of a deity who sent the Entente bad harvests to help German submarine activities. Such absurdities incur the rebuke of the staunch old patriarch, "Though he slay me yet will I trust in him"; there is no excuse for seeking to inflict them on the austerities of Islam.

Climate and terrain have a marked influence on the form religion takes in its human manifestation. Missionary literature a.s.serts this clearly with regard to Islam, describing it, aptly enough, as a religion of desert and oasis thence deriving its austere and sensual features, but the thesis applies with equal force to Christianity. The marked cleavage of hermit-like asceticism and gross sensuality which rock-bound deserts and the lush Nile valley wrought in Egyptian Christendom has been described by every writer dealing with that subject, and Arabian Christianity drooped, and finally died, in the arid pastoral uplands of Jauf and Nejran long before it succ.u.mbed in fertile, hard-working Yamen.

If the East became Christian next week there would be the same rank growth and final atrophy or disintegrating schism for lack of outside opposition. Missionaries are quick enough to remark on this process in Arabia where Islam is practically unopposed, but will not apply it to Christianity. They do not seem to realise that healthy compet.i.tion maintains the vitality of religion no less than trade or any other form of human effort requiring continuous energy and application. Islam revivified a decadent Christianity, and the attacks of modern missionaries are strengthening Islam. They justify these attacks and urge further support for them on the grounds that Islam is moribund and now is the time to give it the _coup de grace_, or that Islam is the most dangerous foe to Christendom in the world and must be fought to a finish lest it unite three hundred million Moslems against us. I have seen both reasons given in the same missionary book; both are absurd.

The latter is a mere red herring drawn across the trail of existing facts, more so, indeed, than the ex-Kaiser's Yellow Peril, for that at least was trailed from a vast country enclosing within a ring fence a huge population of h.o.m.ogeneous race and creed. As for crus.h.i.+ng Islam by missionary enterprise, you cannot kill a great religion with pin-p.r.i.c.ks, however numerous and frequent; you can only cause superficial hurts and irritation, as in a German student's duel. Every religion contains the germs of its own destruction within itself (which it can resist indefinitely so long as it is healthy and vigorous), but no outside efforts, however overwhelming, can do aught but stiffen its adherents.

The early Christian Church was driven off the face of the earth into catacombs, but emerged to rule supreme in the very city which had driven her underground; Muhammad barely escaped from Mecca with his life, but returned to make it the centre of his creed, and Crusaders died in hopeless defeat at Hattin cursing "Mahound" with their last breath as the enemy of their faith, yet their very presence there showed how Islam had revived Christianity.

_Per aspera ad astra:_ there is no easy road or short cut to collective, spiritual progress. I am not arguing against possible "acts of grace"

working on individuals, but the uplift of a race, a cla.s.s or even a congregation cannot be done by a sort of spiritual legerdemain based on hypnotic suggestion. Individuals may be so swayed for the time being, and, in a few favourable cases, the initial impetus will be carried on, but most human souls are like locusts and flutter earthward when the wind drops. They may have advanced more or less, but are just as likely to be deflected or even swept back again by a change in the wind.

Revivalist campaigns and salvation by a _coup de theatre_ do not encourage consecutive religious thought, which is the only stable foundation of religious belief; second-hand convictions do not wear well in the storm and suns.h.i.+ne of unsheltered lives, and a creed that has to be treated like an orchid is no use to anybody.

If the same amount of earnest, consecutive effort and clear thinking had been applied to religion as has gone to build up civilisation we should all be leading harmonious spiritual lives to-day and sin and sorrow would probably have been banished from the earth, but few people think of applying their mental faculties to religion, and its exploitation by modern mercantile methods is not the same thing at all. Civilisation is an accretion of countless efforts and ceaseless striving to ameliorate existing conditions, whereas religion started as a perfect thesis and has since got overgrown with human bigotry and fantasies while absorbing very little of the vast, increasing store of human knowledge. That is why civilisation has got so much in advance of religion that the latter cannot lead or guide the former, but only lags behind, like a horse hitched to a cart-tail. Missionary writers are rather apt to confuse the gifts of civilisation with the thing itself. A savage can be taught to use a rifle or an electric switch or even a flame-projecter, but this is no proof that he is really civilised. On the other hand, the scholarly recluse and philosopher whose works uplift and refine humanity may bungle even with the "fool-proof" lift which takes him up to his own eyrie in Flat-land, but he is none the less civilised.

They would have us believe that petticoats and pantaloons are the hall-mark of Christian civilisation, and one of their favourite sneers at Arabia (as a proof of its benighted condition and need of their ministrations) is "a land without manufacture where machinery is looked on as a sort of marvel." As a matter of fact, Arabia can manufacture all she really wants, and did so when we blockaded her coasts; nor is machinery any more of a marvel to the average Arabian Arab than it is to the average Occidental. Both use intelligently such machinery as they find necessary in their pursuits and occupations, though neither can make it or repair it except superficially, and both fumble more or less with unfamiliar mechanical appliances. The young man from the country blows the gas out or tries to light his cheroot at an incandescent bulb, and may be considered lucky if he does not get some swift, silent form of vehicular traffic in the small of his back when he is gaping at an electric advertis.e.m.e.nt in changing-coloured lights. It has been my object, and to a certain extent my duty, on several occasions to try to impress a party of chiefs and their retinue when visiting Aden from the wildest parts of Arabia Felix (which can be very wild indeed). On the same morning I have taken them over a man-of-war, on the musketry-range to see a Maxim at practice and down into a twelve-inch casemate when the monster was about to fire. They never turned a hair, but asked many intelligent questions and a few amusing ones, tried to cadge a rifle or two from the officer showing them the racks for small arms, condemned the Maxim for "eating cartridges too fast" and were much tickled by the gunner-officer's joke that they could have the big cannon if they would take it away with them.