The benefits of the abolition of slave-raiding and kidnapping are immediate and obvious to everyone. Even the Arab can understand them, but he finds it very difficult to appreciate our attitude—which, needless to say, is uncompromising enough—towards slavery as a domestic institution. It is the one serious complaint which he has against the new government. His domestic habits and customs have been completely based on slavery for centuries. Slavery is permitted and recognised by the Koran. In most cases the slaves themselves have been treated more like members of the family than as slaves, and no doubt many of them have had far happier lives than they would have had in their own villages. Nor is it difficult to point to evils which have arisen from the emancipation of the slaves. It is a melancholy fact that many of the towns in the Soudan are crowded with freed slaves, too lazy to do anything but steal, while the women have recourse to an even less reputable occupation. It is easier to break down the social system of centuries than to build up a sounder fabric in its place. But the thing had absolutely to be done if the Soudan was to have a real regeneration. Even when the slaves have been well treated, the demoralization caused by slavery has been great. The Arabs have all the vices of a slave-owning people. It was a good time to make an absolutely fresh start. All changes of such magnitude are bound to produce dislocations. The evils of the change will die out with the present generation. The good must be waited for patiently, but it is sure to come. CHAPTER XIX EDUCATION AND THE GORDON COLLEGE Probably the last thing that a military government might be expected to take an interest in is education, and yet few educational establishments are so widely famous as the Gordon College at Khartoum. As yet it owes its reputation to the fact that it was founded by one great soldier in memory of another, not to its achievements; it was born great. But already it has justified its founders; its mere existence marks an extraordinary contrast between the character of the present régime in the Soudan and that of any preceding.