Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/36

xxx Captain Mylne in cold blood still roams the hills unpunished—gross insults are the sole acknowledgments of our peaceful overtures—the British flag has been fired upon without return, our cruizers being ordered to act only on the defensive,—and our forbearance to attack is universally asserted and believed to arise from mere cowardice. Such is, and such will be, the character of the Arab!

The Sublime Porte still preserves her possessions in the Tahamah, and the regions conterminous to Al-Yaman, by the stringent measures with which Mohammed Ali of Egypt opened the robber-haunted Suez road. Whenever a Turk or a traveller is murdered, a few squadrons of Irregular Cavalry are ordered out; they are not too nice upon the subject of retaliation, and rarely refuse to burn a village or two, or to lay waste the crops near the scene of outrage.

A civilized people, like ourselves, objects to such measures for many reasons, of which none is more feeble than the fear of perpetuating a blood feud with the Arabs. Our present relations with them are a "very pretty quarrel," and moreover one which time must strengthen, cannot efface. By a just, wholesome, and unsparing severity we may inspire the Badawi with fear instead of contempt: the veriest visionary would deride the attempt to animate him with a higher sentiment.

"Peace," observes a modern sage, "is the dream of the wise, war is the history of man." To indulge in such dreams is but questionable wisdom. It was not a "peace-policy" which gave the Portuguese a seaboard extending from Cape Non to Macao. By no peace policy the Osmanlis of a past age pushed their victorious arms from the deserts of Tartary to Aden, to Delhi, to Algiers, and to the gates of Vienna. It was no peace policy which made the Russians seat themselves upon