gone, he is forgotten; no man so meek and none so mean
but he might spit upon his tomb. Yet the evil work which he did in his
evil time is done to-day, if not by his grandson, then in his grandson's
name--the degradation of man's honour, the cruel wrong of woman's, the
shame of base usury, and the iniquity of justice that may be bought! Of
such corruption this story will tell, for it is a tale of tyranny that
is every day repeated, a voice of suffering going up hourly to the
powers of the world, calling on them to forget the secret hopes and
petty jealousies whereof Morocco is a cause, to think no more of any
scramble for territory when the fated day of that doomed land has come,
and only to look to it and see that he who fills the throne of Abd
er-Rahman shall be the last to sit there._

_Yet it is the grandeur of human nature that when it is trodden down
it waits for no decree of nations, but finds its own solace amid the
baffled struggle against inimical power in the hopes of an exalted
faith. That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the
narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning
of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where
humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt. On the one hand, the hard
experience of daily existence; on the other hand, the soul crying out
that the things of this world are not the true realities. Savage vices
make savage virtues. God and man are brought face to face._

_In the heart of Morocco there is one man who lives a life that is like
a hymn, appealing to God against tyranny and corruption and shame. This
great soul is the leader of a vast following which has come to him from
every scoured and beaten corner of the land. His voice sounds throughout
Barbary, and wheresoever men are broken they go to him, and wheresoever
women are fallen and wrecked they seek the mercy and the shelter of his
face. He is poor, and has nothing to give them save one thing only, but
that is the best thing of all--it is hope. Not hope in life, but hope
in death, the sublime hope whose radiance is always around him. Man that
veils his face before the mysteries of the hereafter, and science that
reckons the laws of nature and ignores the power of God, have no place
with the Mahdi. The unseen is his certainty; the miracle is all in all
to him; he throngs the air with marvels; God speaks to him in dreams
when he sleeps, and warns and directs him by s