you change for
half-a-crown you have to hire a donkey to carry it away; the Moorish
language is so guttural that no one can ever hope to pronounce it aright
who has not been brought up within hearing of the grunting of camels, a
steady course of sneezing being, consequently, the only way by which a
European can acquire anything like the proper accent; the Sultan does not
know how much he is married, but he unquestionably is so to a very large
extent: on the principle that you cannot have too much of a good thing a
woman is valued in proportion to her stoutness, and so far from there
being any reduction made in the marriage-market for taking a quantity,
you must pay so much per pound; the Arabs believe the Shereef of Wazan to
be such a holy man that, if he is guilty of taking champagne, the
forbidden wine is turned into milk as he quaffs it, and if he gets
extremely drunk he is merely in a mystical trance.

Mr. Stutfield, however, has his serious moments, and his account of the
commerce, government and social life of the Moors is extremely
interesting. It must be confessed that the picture he draws is in many
respects a very tragic one. The Moors are the masters of a beautiful
country and of many beautiful arts, but they are paralysed by their
fatalism and pillaged by their rulers. Few races, indeed, have had a
more terrible fall than these Moors. Of the great intellectual
civilisation of the Arabs no trace remains. The names of Averroes and
Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown. Fez, once the
Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial
caravansary. Its universities have vanished, its library is almost
empty. Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of
living by bad government. But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the
future. So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that 'Morocco may go
her own way,' he strongly supports Captain Warren's proposition that we
should give up Gibraltar to Spain in exchange for Ceuta, and thereby
prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a French lake, and give England a
new granary for corn. The Moorish Empire, he warns us, is rapidly
breaking up, and if in the 'general scramble for Africa' that has already
begun, the French gain possession of Morocco, he points out that our
supremacy over the Straits will be lost. Whatever may be thought of Mr.
Stutfield's political views, and his suggestions for 'multiple control'
a