The happy results of this policy are particularly noticeable in Tunis, where the French have made no attempt to modernize the ancient city, the Medina, access to which is gained from the European quarter through the old water-gate, Bab-el-Bahar, now known as the Porte de France. Though electric tramways encircle the city and run far into the suburbs—the service between Tunis and Carthage, I might remark in passing, is surpassed only by that between Yokohama and Tokio—all proposals to disfigure the picturesque native quarter have met with a stern refusal from the authorities. Street-names, lighting, and sanitation have been introduced, however, and the old town itself is incredibly clean for an Eastern city; cleaner by far than many cities in Italy and Spain. In fact, Tunis merits the title of “The White,” which it has so long enjoyed, almost as much by virtue of its astonishing cleanliness as because of its snowy buildings, which mount, tier above tier, to the citadel, like “a burnous with the Kasbah for a hood.” In these Moslem lands, where religious fanaticism goes hand in hand with suspicion of the foreigner, the French have had to exercise the utmost tact in effecting even the most urgent sanitary reforms. M. Jusserand, for years French ambassador to the United States, once told me that, when he was chief of the Tunisian Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the city of Tunis was threatened by an epidemic because the bodies in the local cemeteries were too near the surface. Instead of arbitrarily ordering the graves to be deepened, an action which inevitably would have aroused native resentment and perhaps have precipitated serious troubles, the French resident-general sent a politely worded message to the chief cadi, the head of the Moslem religious community, inquiring whether the depth of graves was specified in the Koran. He was informed that, according to Koranic law, graves must be deep enough to cover a standing man to his shoulders. Thus scripturally fortified, the resident-general called the attention of the chief cadi to the failure of the Tunisians to abide by the tenets of their own religion, whereupon the natives lost no time in deepening the graves themselves.