Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/156

140 the precepts of the Prophet Aïssa, as the strong in your land persecute the weak, the rich dominate the poor and your scholars despise the illiterate. In your country every man is the enemy of every other; every one is compelled by the conditions of life to struggle interminably for existence and therefore each envies the other, seeing in him a competitor, an enemy, a persecutor. Nothing unites you, neither a common faith, rigid morals nor science. These states are as a building made without cement, with no binding power between the individual stones that compose them. You have ravaged one another in a war which has terrified the non-Christian world with its unimaginable crimes, its cruelty and its blind madness. The fabric of your states has been rent asunder, families and societies have been broken up, and you cannot rise up to indulge again in the madness of strife. You came to the colored peoples with words of simulated love—and what have you done? You have regarded and used us not as men but as cattle, necessary to the accomplishment of your aims. You thought that you could do what you wished with us, could take from us our lands and the results of our toil, could change our customs and faith, so as to be able to make of us slaves, without rights and obedient to you, because we were weak, hungry, illiterate and consequently powerless in the face of your science, your machines, your carbines and your cannon. But we also have our science, a spiritual science, while yours is that of the material.

"Now you seek to take from us our moral leader and abolish the caliphate, raising by your action a storm of intrigue and ill will. When we protest, you laugh; but we