He does not know in how heroic a fashion our culture was kept alive until it should again easily dominate the world. He has against his own civilization something of a twist, like that which makes occasional, cranky Englishmen anti-English. Nor does he grasp the central truth that the bad blows which came nearest to destroying us, were not those of the fifth and sixth centuries, but those of the ninth. He says, for instance, that “Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the times could offer ... the broadest, freshest, and cleanest political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the world.” You might just as well say that of Bolshevism. For, though Islam was a much finer thing than Bolshevism, yet its appeal was of exactly the same simple, subversive sort. It did not flood the East, Africa, and Spain because it was “broad” or “fresh”—words of doubtful meaning. But when he adds, “It offered better terms than any other to the mass of mankind,” he is right, especially as regards the first area of its expansion: Syria. It appealed there to the underworld of a very ancient and fatigued civilization, and met an army largely recruited from the Arabs themselves for its then decisive cavalry arm. These Arab troops of the Empire half-sympathized with the enemy before battle and readily joined them during and after it. Nor must we forget that Islam failed to extirpate even in Syria the religion which it attacked, nor again that in those areas there had been years of desolation through war and violent religious quarrel with the central power. It was not till the tenth century that Islam became universal in Barbary. It swept Spain, because the ownership of land in Spain was in too few hands; but the mass of the people of Spain retained the Faith; and, but for their civilized traditions, their Mohammedan rulers of three hundred years could not have achieved what they did in building and tillage—for they certainly failed to do anything so great in North Africa after the Christian culture of Barbary had been killed. The defeat of Islam in the heart of Gaul had nothing to do with the “vast line of communications from Arabia.” Can Mr. Wells really think that the military base of the Arabs in Central Gaul was a base in Arabia? No. The victory of Charles Martel which saved all Europe in the eighth century was a victory of European brain and muscle over Asiatic: not the last. It was the rally of our people; and from that rally they pressed forward unceasingly, until at last they undid the greater part of the evil which had been done. In his description of the Mohammedan world between the opening of the eighth century and the great Mongol invasions, Mr. Wells is at his best.