helped in the ruin of women. Concubinage is the black stain in Islám. With Moḥammad’s views of women, we could hardly expect him to do better; but, on the other hand, he could scarcely have done worse. There are, however, one or two alleviating circumstances. One is the fact that the canker has not eaten into the whole of Eastern society; it is chiefly among the rich that the evil effects of the system are felt. And another fact which shows that the Mohammadan system, bad as it is, is free from a defect which social systems better in other respects than Moḥammad’s are subject to is the extreme rarity of prostitution in Muslim towns. The courtesan forms a very small item in the census of a Mohammadan city, and is retained more for strangers from Europe than for the Muslim inhabitants. Instances are frequently occurring in the Indian law courts which show the strong feeling that exists on the subject among the Mohammadans of India. They consider it quite inconceivable that a Muslim should have illicit intercourse with a free Muslimeh woman, and this inconceivableness of the action is urged as evidence in trials of the legitimacy of children. But whilst admitting the importance of this remarkable feature in Islám, it must not be forgotten that the liberty allowed by their law to Muslims in the matter of concubines does not very materially differ from prostitution, and whilst the latter is directly forbidden by the dominant religion of Europe, concubinage is as directly permitted by Islám. One would think that long intercourse with Europeans might have somewhat raised the estimation of women in the East; but either because travellers in the East are not always the best specimens of Western morality, or because the Eastern mind has an unequalled aptitude for assimilating the bad and rejecting the good in any system it meets, it is certain that women are no better off now than they were in the East. A well-known correspondent of a leading daily print writes thus of Turkish home life:—