To save the face of the Moroccans, who are a proud, high-spirited people, the French have taken great pains to maintain the polite fiction that Morocco is still a sovereign state by official reference to it on all occasions as “the Shereefian Empire”; by requiring that all laws and decrees shall receive the approval of the sultan, who is their own passive instrument; by surrounding him with the pomp and circumstance which Oriental peoples expect of their rulers; and by permitting him to maintain a miniature, highly picturesque, and quite innocuous military establishment in the form of the famous Black Guard, or, as it is better known, the Garde Chérifienne. The solicitude displayed in safeguarding the sultan’s prestige, the constant catering by the French, in superficial matters at least, to native pride, serve to illustrate France’s administrative policy in Morocco, which is one of control as opposed to command, of direction instead of repression, of the velvet glove rather than the iron hand. The truth of the matter is that France occupies a highly delicate position in Morocco; she is seated on a volcano which, though quiescent, is not extinct; and in order to avoid stirring it into action she realizes that she must pick her steps with the utmost care. In view of the disturbed conditions which still exist in certain districts, the country is at present divided into three administrative zones. In the first, military control has ceased altogether and the civil administration has been firmly established; in the second, which is in a somewhat less advanced state, the civil and military authorities work together; while in the third, which is closed to travelers and colonists, active military operations are still in progress and the army is in full control. The purely domestic affairs of the country are under the Ministry of the Interior, nominally headed by a vizier, whose orders are executed among the tribes by caïds and in the cities by pashas. Criminal cases are now adjudicated in the French courts, which have set the natives an example of uprightness and justice undreamed of by them before; but civil actions are tried by native tribunals, a pasha sitting in judgment when the cases are of a secular nature, a cadi when religious questions are involved. The Jews have their own rabbinical tribunals, immune from Moslem interference; and the Berber hill tribes, with whose domestic affairs the French and native authorities alike wisely refrain from meddling, administer justice according to their own barbaric ideas and the customs of their fathers.