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172 vanish to-night, another immense dominion in North Africa organised, in our own day, by Lugard, Goldie, Cromer, and Kitchener, would be there to take its place. So that Asia, it may be said, cannot be so much to us.

Besides, the day will come when this secondary, this nether, dominion will deflect, or even for a time dominate, the policy of the world. For, in the tract more than three thousand miles long, stretching right across Africa, and bounded on the north by the Sahara deserts and south by the equator, live endless fighting races. At the close of the nineteenth century two processes, which had both been in operation for centuries, were completed in their regard. On the one hand, they were annexed by Europe wholesale; and, on the other, the long-standing Mohammedan invasions from Arabia were mostly accomplished. The European had come, with his precise machinery and his less precise ideas; and the Arab had come also, with a prayer-mat and a koran, bearing across the hot desert the hotter formulæ of Islam. These melt some of the chains round the limbs of the benighted African. For, to apply the words of Gibbon, "the subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arises in a moment the free and equal companion of the victorious Moslem." Thus, the most energetic peoples in west and east are combining to inspire three thousand miles of Fuzzy-wuzzy warriors with novel hopes and powers. A formidable prospect, when we remember that it only