Nor did Mohammed’s reforms stop here. The Koran had already prohibited the use of wine; for, years earlier, the Prophet, while attempting to chide his uncle, Hamza, who was riotously drunk, had received the tipsy response, “Are you not my father’s slave?” Liquor, therefore, had been proscribed as a foe to Islam and the dignity of the prophetic office; this rule was so rigorously enforced, in truth, that even a hero of Bedr had been beaten again and again for perennial intoxication, and on one occasion Mohammed himself hurled clods of dirt at another offender. Gambling, too--the casting of lots and the “arrow-game,” in which camels were the prizes--had been divinely banned as abominations “from amongst the works of Satan.” Mohammed’s acutely sensitive nature now led him to proscribe anything that savored of torture inflicted on animals: living birds might not be used as targets in shooting contests; camels were not to be tied up and left to die on their owners’ graves; cattle were not to be blinded to avert the evil eye; droughts were not to be broken by the common process of affixing flaming torches to the tails of cattle; horses were not to lose their manes and tails, and asses were no longer to be branded or hit in the face. So scrupulously fastidious was the Prophet that he once ordered some Moslems to stop burning an ant-hill, and he also strongly disapproved the ubiquitous practice of cursing camels and cocks. His humanity and foresight were also manifested in more important matters. Blood-feuds--the time-honored and almost ineradicable system of tribal revenge for homicide--he endeavored, with partial success, to wipe out by emphasizing the brotherhood of Islam, and by advocating the acceptance of money as a partial compensation: ethical and legislative essays that gradually led to a saner and more peaceful system of government. Whatever may be thought of his general attitude toward women, he certainly benefited them incalculably by setting up laws that enabled them to inherit and hold property; and the luridly overemphasized harem system, Pagan though it may be, has some virtues that are perhaps absent from the Occidental system of prostitution. His advocacy of the custom by which the wives of captives automatically became the concubines of Moslem conquerors has especially irritated certain modern moralists, who apparently have not reflected very deeply on certain canons of contemporary conduct, in which wealth and social distinction play the rôle of the victorious Islamites. He accepted slavery as a matter of course--and, indeed, Islam has never indulged in any foolish civil strife over the question of bondage--but he insisted that slaves must be treated with the utmost kindness. Men who beat their slaves were placed by him among the lowest of the low; he stated that manumission was a pious act, and he sometimes let offenders off from any punishment when they agreed to free their