Civilized ideas are spread in other ways besides these. One of the great means of such distribution is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which is attended by nearly half a million Mohammedans from all parts of the Orient. At that time Mecca becomes a great camp meeting or bush meeting, such as we farmers have in Virginia. The people come together and gossip. They discuss the crops and ask one another how they are getting along. Hassan Ali of Egypt says to Mohammed of Turkey, “How is business? Are you making money, and how does your government treat you?” Mohammed replies that the Turks are taxed to death, but they hope for much under the new Sultan. Thereupon Hassan says that the English have cut down the taxes in Egypt and that the church has plenty of money in the treasury. He tells how he has been able to send his boy to college, and that he hopes he will some day be an official. The Turk, thereupon, longs for a better government. At the same time the college students tell what they have learned, and as a result the twentieth-century spirit of modern progress is stirring the Mohammedan world. In addition to the collegiate work great advances in the spread of our civilization are being made by the Protestant missions. There are now thousands of native Christians in Syria and from seventy-five to one hundred thousand native Christians in the empire of Turkey. The American missionaries alone have more than one hundred schools, with five or six thousand pupils, and the English have many more. Here in Beirut is the largest and most up-to-date publishing house in the Orient. It belongs to the American mission, and annually turns out tens of thousands of Bibles, school textbooks, and other works on religious and scientific subjects. Altogether, it has published more than seven hundred different works in Arabic, and it is estimated that it has printed in the neighbourhood of a billion pages of one kind or other. It issues around one hundred thousand volumes a year, containing altogether something like thirty million pages. Its Bibles published in Arabic are sold throughout the Mohammedan world.