may be treated to corrosive sublimate or arsenic in his tea.' No feast-day passes without the imprisonment of some high officials. False charges are made against the 'unprotected rich; they are often tortured to extract money from them; by such proceedings a governor may earn for himself the title of 'Father of Sugarloaves'-bribes being given in this form-but at length when he is 'fat' enough, according to the Moorish idiom, he too will be summoned to the Sublime Porte of Fez, and 'squeezed' in his turn. The bashaw's nominal income may be a few pence a day; his ascertained spoils, of which Mr. Meakin gives an authentic and amusing list, came in the instance quoted to more than two hundred pounds a month. Hence, protection from governor and Sultan is eagerly sought; Europeans have made the most of their opportunities; and the natives have been willing to pay high for appointments which carried with them freedom from their own rulers. But, in our author's opinion, until the Government is reformed, protection, though liable to abuse, is inevitable, and ought to be regulated by the agreement of all concerned. Let the European nations,' he says, protect every Moor and Jew they can, upholding them through thick and thin, till the Moorish Government yields and protects them itself.' The system began when piracy flourished, when Christian slaves were sold by auction in the cities of Morocco. It has been supported to encourage a foreign trade which would otherwise never have existed. And it is now the strength of Christian influence in a country where more refined methods are doomed to failure. The people, it is certain, ask only to be saved from plundering Kaïds and soldiers whose trade it is to eat up provinces. There is a shrewd saying of Mohammed's often quoted, An empire may stand with infidelity; it will not stand with tyranny.' The unbroken tyranny of the Shareefs and their army of locusts may seem to give it the lie. Yet Mr. Meakin is confident that, although 'the courage and fanaticism of the Moors will make them a difficult race to conquer, their avarice and treachery will tell against them in the long run.' The Moorish Empire itself is now much like a stranded ship, at the mercy of Europeans, who cannot agree how they shall break up or share it. From their point of view it is corrupt, decadent, barbarous, and almost effete. Our politicians are of one mind with our philosophers in applying to this, as to every other Mohammedan country, the tests of civilisation and progress which they would apply to their own. But Morocco has never known what we term civilisation. is the land of a mixed people who worship the Koran which they cannot read, It while they indulge their sensual appetites with the naïveté of children. They submit to the strong hand as the true divine right, consider the art of lying as given for man's protection, cheat and are cheated by natural instinct, and display at once the vices of slaves and despots. Islam does not propose to itself the ethical life as the aim of its teaching; it is a ritual, a custom, or a tradition; it has never been progressive; and its revolutions, led by a Mahdi or his lieutenant, are plundering expeditions which take religion for a banner. During the last hundred and forty years the Christian States, though at variance among themselves, have yet carved empires out of Islam; they have set up under the name of protection colonies in all its chief towns and factories on all its coasts, to which the resources of the natives are being gradually subjugated. Europeans can now deal as unjustly with Morocco as Morocco ever dealt with them. But this 'travesty of an Empire' has in it no principle of reform or regeneration, since its people want neither. As they were a thousand years ago, such they are to-day. Their lawyers, priests, doctors, learned men, saints, pilgrims, soldiers, officials, have never changed from the old-world pattern, which may be primitive or mediæval, but is the same now that it was in the thirteenth century of our era. What they call education we should call superstition; their science is on a level with astrology; their disdain for the Nazarene is transcendent. No missionary makes the slightest impression on them. Their government, time out of mind, has been a tyranny; but the people have never risen against tyrants as such. Rebellions of tribes against the Sultan, wars of the mountain against the plain, massacres and assassinations-in short, anarchy of one kind or another they always have seen, and expect always to see. It is an instructive lesson for modern Christians, showing us within twenty-eight hours' sail of France the barbarism of the Middle Ages in full vigour. There are, indeed, 'genial, polished, and picturesque Moors'; as in the days of chivalry, manner, costume, and a certain outward magnificence light up the cruelties of war outside the city and injustice within. But an infallible Koran destroys all hope of moving upward from the ideals which it has stereotyped. Morocco is framed on the military pattern, with clans obedient to a chief, and on the absolute or old monarchical plan, which cannot distinguish the sovereign from the law which he administers. It has, therefore, no constitution, but only custom; rights which are divine, or no rights at all. The Ulemas will always find Scripture' to justify what a strong Sultan decrees. Imprisonment, and even death, under this régime, can have no terrors for men accustomed to bloodshed, therefore the prison is a house of torment; and mutilation, flogging, the salting of hands,' and starving in granaries underground, hold the place which torture did with us in not very distant ages. Heads are still fixed above the city gates, in front of which seethes and festers the offal of dead beasts. The police are intensely corrupt. The governors of towns or districts make a hundred times as much by bribes as by their legal emoluments. The Sultan himself expects and receives presents whenever he gives an audience; and while the Kaïd, or secular judge, affects to maintain the Emperor's peace by his arbitrary jurisdiction, and is often unable to read, the Kadi is bound to give sentence after the Koran, is chosen for his learning, and holds out to the accused a better hope of justice. Again we seem to be looking on at the Middle Ages, with their spiritual courts, their learned clergy and unlearned soldiers, their violence tempered by religion, and their superstition into which a stray gleam of ethics might pierce occasionally, when Jews or heretics were not in question and human nature could assert its kindlier instincts. The long agony by which medieval Europe passed out of this condition to equality before the law, an enlightened free press, and a recognition of popular rights, was spread over many centuries. Reform came from within; and the New Testament did not oppose it. Morocco has neither science nor the New Testament; it is satisfied with the creed of Islam ; and though the people are ground down with oppressive taxes, their very ignorance is a protection to the governors against whom they may sometimes revolt, but whose character they will never amend. If the Powers of Europe could agree to put Morocco in commission, with a trained civil service, they might do for the Moors what England is doing for the Egyptians. But two civilisations are face to face on the shores of the Mediterranean, and while it is evident that no Mohammedan ruler can withstand the science and progress which we call Christian, it is equally clear that no European Power has yet transformed the spirit or refined the daily life of any people who believe in Islam. ART. IV.-RECENT POLITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE. 1. Politik. Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Berlin. By Heinrich von Treitschke. Two vols. Leipzig: 18971898. 2. First Principles in Politics. By W. S. Lilly. London: John Murray, 1899. 3. English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine. By William Graham. London: Edward Arnold, 1899. 4. The Philosophical Theory of the State. By Bernard Bosanquet. London: Macmillan, 1899. 5. Problems of Modern Democracy. By E. L. Godkin. London: Constable, 1896. 6. Some Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy. By E. L. Godkin. London: Constable, 1898. 7. American Ideals and other Essays, Social and Political. By Theodore Roosevelt. Second edition. New York and London: Putnam's Sons, 1898. Is S there such a thing as political philosophy? The mere fact that the question can be asked, that to nine tenths of the readers of this Review it will appear to be the obvious question, is evidence of the profound change that has passed over the spirit of political inquiry. For the first time, it might almost be said, since Aristotle, we find ourselves face to face with the bare facts, unbiassed and uninspired by any absolute creed, asking as soberly as we may, in various moods of confidence, hope, indifference, or despair, What has been? and What ought to be? but hardly expecting to either enquiry a final and comprehensive answer. With the question, What has been? we are here only indirectly concerned. It is in connexion with the other question-What ought to be?—that we propose to examine the trend of recent political speculation. In this, as in all other departments of modern thought, the characteristic note is relativity; a note which implies, here as elsewhere, a revolutionary change in the whole way of conceiving the subject. For political philosophy, from the earliest times, has been marked by the character of absolutism. Even Aristotle, positive and scientific as he was in his method and aim, was able, owing to the limitation and comparative simplicity of the material before him, to discover for the problems he raised solutions that he could believe to be definite and final. For him the City-State was the only polity that deserved consideration; and of this polity, various as were the forms which it had assumed under various conditions, he yet felt himself competent to formulate, with something like finality, both the absolutely ideal and the best practicable type. Since his time the civilised world has passed through a series of transformations undreamed of in his philosophy; and these, it might naturally have been supposed, would have been reflected in the course of political speculation. But that is precisely what did not occur. From the fourth century B.C., one might say, to the eighteenth of our era, the theory of politics was divorced from experience. For two thousand years the doctrine of Natural Law, derived originally from Aristotle himself, elaborated by the Stoic philosophers, grafted on Roman jurisprudence, and finally incorporated into Christian theology, was made in one form or another the basis of all political speculation. It was of the essence of this doctrine to formulate deductively, without reference to the facts or possibilities of any particular age, a complete system of general principles. There are imprinted, it held, in the Reason of man, quâ man, independent of time, place, or circumstance, certain fixed and infallible rules of Right, the realisation of which is the object of all laws and government. These rules prescribe the ideal, an ideal indifferent to experience, absolute, not relative, for everywhere and every when, not for here and now. The natural affinity of such a doctrine to theology was discovered by the Pagan and developed in detail by the Christian world. But it does not depend on theology, though it may readily be subordinated to it. more It survived the break-up of the universal authority of the Church, and in the form of a purely ethical rule championed the cause of reform and revolution. Yet it is no necessarily revolutionary than conservative in its spirit. Its one characteristic note is its absolutism. It is the categorical imperative' of politics, in which form it definitely appears in Kant; but the content of this Imperative, the thing commanded, as opposed to the character of the command, every speculator, once the authority of the Church was undermined, was at liberty to fill in as his own prejudices might dictate. Natural Law, in a word, was the annihilation of political science, while it was the apotheosis of political philosophy. To the question What has been? or What is? it was indifferent; to the question What ought to be? it professed to have found an absolute and final answer. Such was the general character of the conception which in one form or another dominated political speculation for two thousand years. But this whole way of approaching the subject has been revolutionised by modern thought. Natural Law has not indeed been simply swept away, in spite of the English |