ligence that her chief people are beginning to reform their
domestic life, and even, in some instances, to adopt the practice of
monogamy. The truth would seem to be that the same process is being
effected to-day in their minds as was formerly the case with their
ancestors. In the eighth century, the Arabs, brought into contact with
Greek philosophy, assimilated it by a natural process of their reasoning
into the body of their own beliefs; and now in the nineteenth they are
assimilating a foreign morality into their own system of morals.

Not only in Egypt,--in Oman and Peninsular Arabia, generally there is a
real feeling of cordiality between the Mohammedan and his Christian
"guest." The abolition of slavery in Zanzibar was a concession to
European opinion at least as much as to European force; and a moral
sympathy is acknowledged between a Moslem and a Christian State which
has its base in a common sense of right and justice. I have good reason
to believe that, were the people of Yemen to effect their deliverance
from Constantinople, the same humane feeling would be found to exist
among them; and I know that it exists in Nejd; while even in Hejaz,
which is commonly looked upon as the hot-bed of religious intolerance, I
found all that was truly Arabian in the population as truly liberal.
Under the late Grand Sherif, Abd el Hamid's reputed victim, these ideas
were rapidly gaining ground; and had it not been for his untimely end, I
have high authority for stating that the Mohammedan Holy Land would now
be open to European intercourse, and slavery, or at least the slave
trade, be there abolished.

There is, therefore, some reason to hope that, were Arabian thought once
more supreme in Islam, its tendency would be in the direction of a wider
and more liberal reading of the law, and that in time a true
reconciliation might be effected with Christendom, perhaps with
Christianity. The great difficulty which, as things now stand, besets
reform is this: the Sheriat, or written code of law, still stands in
orthodox Islam as an _unimpeachable_ authority. The law in itself is an
excellent law, and as such commends itself to the loyalty of honest and
God-fearing men; but on certain points it is irreconcilable with the
modern needs of Islam, and it cannot legally be altered.

When it was framed it was not suspected that Mohammedans would ever be
subjects of a Christian power, or that the Mohammedan State would ever
need to accommo