Our brief stay among the Shelluhs in this valley helped to confirm our previous impression that they form the best element in the population of Marocco. How much of this superiority is due to race, and how much to the conditions of existence in a mountain country, where steady labour is indispensable, may be a question for discussion; but as the same is also apparent among the people long settled in the low country at the foot of the mountains, it may be inferred that the inherited qualities of the mountain tribes are not speedily lost when they are subjected to altered conditions. We are told by Rohlfs that on the northern skirts of the Marocco Sahara the Shelluhs have adopted a predatory life, and are the most dreaded of all the wandering robbers of that region. But when we learn that all the fertile oases of the Sahara have been monopolised by a small class of Arab descent, who rest their claims on religious authority, it is not apparent that there is any alternative for those who do not belong to the privileged class; and, under such an anomalous condition of society, the energy of the superior race will show itself in robbery, where that becomes the only means of obtaining a livelihood. To judge from what we saw of the country, the best thing that could happen for Marocco would be the substitution for the Moorish government of an authority strong enough to keep the Bereber tribes from intestine feuds, and intelligent enough to leave them a large measure of self-government, under a moderate and just fiscal system. Gradual extension of irrigation works would fit for cultivation large tracts now unproductive, and the superfluous population of the mountain valleys would spread into the plains, and develop the latent resources of the country. If it be said that the gradual diffusion of more intelligent ideas of government may gradually draw the Sultans of Marocco into the path of progress, and thus effect without violence as rapid an advance as is compatible with the ideas and character of the native population, the answer seems to be that this supposition is not probable in itself, and is not justified by experience. For over a thousand years since the date of the Saracen conquest the two races that make up the population have remained perfectly distinct. The gradual extension of the central authority may have done something for the maintenance of external tranquillity, but it has been marked by a general and persistent decline in the prosperity of the country. It suffices to read the description given by Leo Africanus, himself a Moor, of the numerous large and thriving towns visited by him in the early years of the sixteenth century, just at the time when they were brought under the rule of the Moorish Sultans, to measure the vast falling off that has since followed.