ill more puzzled.
What was it, then, that lay at the root of this problem? The answer would
appear to be in the ethical standpoint of the sixteenth century. We are so
accustomed in the present day to hear of the rights of man that we are apt
to forget that, in the time of Barbarossa, of Dragut, of Charles V., and
the Medicean Popes such a thing did not exist, and the only rights
possessed by the common man were those vouchsafed to him by his sovereign
lord. We have also to take another factor into consideration, which is that
what we call "humanity" simply did not exist, the result being that the
raids of the Sea-wolves were not judged by the great ones of the earth from
the standpoint of the amount of suffering which they inflicted, but in what
manner these proceedings affected the wealth and power of the lord of the
territory which had been despoiled. So differently was society constituted
in those days that the very victims acquiesced more or less meekly in their
fate, each one unconsciously voicing that most pathetic saying of the
Russian peasant that "God is high and the Czar is far away."

The fact of the intolerable lot of the common man in these times helps us
to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem:
which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight
for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most
irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred? The life of the common
soldier or sailor did not offer many advantages; it was generally a short
and anything but a merry one, and the thing by which it was most
profoundly affected was capture by the corsairs.

When this happened he became either a "gallerian," rowing out his heart on
the benches of the Moslem galleys, or he festered in some noisome dungeon
in Algiers, Oran, or Tlemcen. For him, however, there was always one avenue
of escape open: he had but to acknowledge that Mahomet was the Prophet of
God and the prison doors would fly open, or the shackles be knocked off the
chain which bound him to the hell of the rower's bench. Many of the
Christian captives had really nothing to bind them to the faith of their
fathers--neither home nor lands, wealth nor kindred, and they were
doubtless dazzled by the amazing success which accompanied the arms of the
leaders of the pirates. Is it wonderful, then, that such men in such an age
should grasp at the chance of freedom and throw in their l