Carefully as Napoleon had cultivated the native authorities, deferred to prejudice and custom, and maintained discipline, native opposition to French rule seems to have been intense. A revolt in Cairo took him by surprise. It had been preached from the minaret by the Muezzins in their daily calls to prayer. It broke out with sudden fury, and many Frenchmen were slaughtered in Cairo and the surrounding villages. Napoleon quelled it promptly and with awful severity. The insurrection, coming as it did upon the heels of all his attempts at conciliation, filled him with indignant resentment, and, in his retaliation, he left nothing undone to strike terror to the Arab soul. Insurgents were shot or beheaded without mercy. Donkey trains bearing sacks were driven to the public square, and the sacks being untied, human heads rolled out upon the ground--a ghastly warning to the on-looking natives. Such is war; such is conquest. The conquered must be tamed. Upon this principle acted the man of no religion, Napoleon, in Egypt, and the Christian soldier, Havelock, in Hindustan. The Christian Englishmen who put down the Indian mutiny were as deaf to humanity as was the Deist who quelled the revolt in Cairo. Like all the cruelty whose injury society really feels, the crime is in the system, not the individual. War is war; and as long as Christendom must have war to work out the mysterious ways of God, we must be content with the thorns as well as the fruits. If it be a part of the white man’s burden to exterminate black and brown and yellow races to clear the way for the thing we call Christian civilization, Napoleon’s course in Egypt was temperate and humane. Upon all his deeds a blessing might be asked by the preachers who incited the soldiers of America, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, in the wars of the year 1900; and the chaplains who went, on good salaries, to pray for those who shot down Filipinos, Chinamen, or even South African Boers could just as easily have given pious sanction to the murders-in-mass committed by Bonaparte.