needed some few millions of Arabs to carry their faith and their rulership as far as Borneo one way and Morocco the other, to threaten Vienna and Paris, and nearly to make good the boast of Bajazet that he would stall his arab at the altar of St. Peter's itself.
However, our duty in those regions at present is negative, for the most part. In that quarter of the world, which for the time is as quiet as gunpowder, our business is to guard against two main dangers. The first of these is that in Islam the religious steam rises with inconceivable rapidity and force, when some one accuses every one else of impiety, and of having made crooked the straight path of the Prophet. Swords are drawn, and under the shadow of the swords is Paradise. Such, for example, at the opening of the nineteenth century, was the career of that Othman who founded the Foulah Empire and made Sokoto his capital; such too, at its close, were the histories of the Mahdi and the Khalifa in our Soudan. All this excites the fear and the faith of the idolatrous Fuzzy-wuzzy, so that Islam in Africa is far more than "a ring cast into the desert," as the Arab historian, Mohammed el Tounsy, calls it. Rather, it is an ocean into which tumbles an ever-breaking shore of primitive beliefs.
The second danger against which we have to guard, in that quarter of the globe, arises from the natural anxiety of the European powers to avail themselves of such an inexhaustible storehouse of
