In the course of several delightful evenings passed in the agreeable society of Sir J. D. Hay and his family, we obtained much curious and valuable information respecting the country and its inhabitants, most of which was confirmed by our own subsequent observation and experience. We already knew that Marocco is the China of the West, and that while other Mohammedan States have been drawn, though at a tardy and halting pace, into following the general movement of European progress, this has remained more isolated and more impenetrable than even the Celestial Empire itself. But we were scarcely prepared to find that the utmost excesses of barbarism are matters of daily occurrence in a country so close at hand; and though we had read startling statements in the books of preceding travellers, and heard confirmatory tales during our stay in North Marocco, we were inclined to think that, at the worst, these referred to solitary acts of cruelty, probably magnified by the proverbial tendency to exaggerate all that is strange and horrible. It was not until we had spent some time in the southern provinces, beyond the reach of European prying observation, that we could persuade ourselves that these terrible stories of cruelty and wrong merely give a true representation of the ordinary condition of the country. Sir J. D. Hay, who probably knows it better than any other European, was not slow to testify to the good qualities of the rural population of Marocco, and the general absence of crime. We were afterwards led to believe that if life and property may be said to be tolerably secure throughout the portion of the empire really subject to the Sultan’s authority, this is due rather to the fact that temptation is rare, and the danger of swift and bloody retribution imminent, than to the existence of any high moral standard among the people. It is a strange inversion of all notions of government, that crime should come from above rather than below, and that the dread that men feel for the safety of their persons and goods is directed rather to the constituted guardians of order than to the outcasts from society. The first feeling of one unused to a barbarous government is surprise that it should be allowed even to exist, much more that it should possess considerable stability, and be handed on from one generation to the next, without a general outburst of resistance. Observation tends to explain this seeming enigma. Bad as it may be, the oppression exercised by the few strikes only those who are in some way conspicuous. The common mass, who offer no special temptation to extortion, escape comparatively unhurt, and feel little sympathy for the victim. Accordingly it is only when a Sultan or a Governor indulges in mere gratuitous acts of cruelty against his humbler subjects, that we hear of a general revolt. Oppression is, after all, less intolerable than anarchy; and at that very time most men would have chosen to live in Marocco rather than in Sicily.