Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/28

xx Turkish Sultan and the Moslem commonalty had the same arms, despotism could not go more than so far. When the Turkish army, a century ago, was new-armed and organized on the European model, naught could stay the despotism of Constantinople. The rugs of Anatolia and the wares of Kutaiyeh, ninety years ago the best faience of the West, have fallen from old standards. So with the solid colors of Peking wares, and the porcelains of the interior. Persia in the last fifty years has seen the art of four centuries cease as all its great caravan roads fell into disorder and the caravans carried European goods to the undoing of native industries unable to develop for lack of courts.

This has been a world movement. The inexorable principle that you cannot build a sound economic structure unless credit and contracts are sustained by courts that can be trusted, works as pitilessly as the attraction of gravitation on the bowing wall and the tottering fence, the arch of untempered mortar and the door jambs whose sill is heaved by frost. Sixty years ago I saw the process beginning in Turkey, first on the coast, later in the interior. Thirty years ago I saw the same forces at work in Morocco, in the mediaeval capital of Fez, whose old Andalusian