Most of us think of Morocco as a treeless, semi-arid, almost level land, yet it has vast forests of oak and pine, several rivers comparable with the Thames or the Hudson, and in the spring its prairies and hill-slopes are carpeted with countless varieties of wild flowers. Far from being level, it is a highly mountainous country; the Moroccan Atlas has a greater average height than the Alps, and at least one of its peaks is higher than any mountain in the United States outside of Alaska. We ourselves went to war in ’98 to end the intolerable rule of Spain in the Western Hemisphere, yet the propaganda skilfully disseminated from Madrid and Paris has blinded us to the fact that Abd-el-Krim and his mountaineers of the Riff were fighting for precisely the same reason for which the Cubans fought—to throw off the yoke of Spanish tyranny and cruelty. Because in the geographies of our school-days large portions of North Africa were painted a speckled yellow, and because of the pictures of sand-dunes reproduced in certain magazines, we habitually picture the Sahara as a trackless waste of orange sand, on which grows no living thing, little realizing that it is broken by mile-high mountain ranges and dotted with oases, some of them as large as a New England State, which support thousands of inhabitants and millions of date-palms. Basing our idea on motion-pictures made in Hollywood, and on novels of the desert school of fiction, we imagine sheikhs—and for heaven’s sake pronounce it _shakes_ instead of _sheeks_!—as romantic, picturesque, debonair gentlemen with chivalrous instincts and charming manners, whereas candor compels me to assert that most of them are blackguardly ruffians, lustful, cruel, vindictive, ignorant, debased, as filthy of mind as of body. We have long accepted as gospel the assertion that the British are the only really successful colonizers in the world; the French colonial we have pictured as a miserable being who spends his days in a hammock, sipping absinthe, reading “La Vie Parisienne,” and counting the hours until he can return to _la belle France_. Yet, in the space of a single generation, these miserable and inefficient beings have in Africa alone conquered and consolidated and civilized a colonial empire greater in area than the United States and all of its possessions put together.