Personally, I am a firm believer in the future of Morocco and the Moors under the guidance and protection of France. I have seen too much of what France has accomplished in far less favoured regions, and under far more discouraging conditions, to think otherwise. Nothing illustrates the latent possibilities of the Moorish character better than an experiment which was made some years ago. At the request of the Sultan, the British minister to Morocco asked his government for permission to send a body of Moors to Gibraltar for the purpose of being instructed in British drill and discipline. The War Office acceding to the request, two hundred Moors, selected at random from various tribes throughout the empire, were sent to Gibraltar and remained there for three years, the men being occasionally changed as they acquired a knowledge of drill. They had good clothing given them, slept in tents, and were allowed by the Sultan a shilling a day, receiving precisely the same treatment as British soldiers. During the three years they were stationed on the Rock, there were only two cases in the police court against them for dissolute conduct or disorder. The soldiers of what civilised nation could have made such a record? Colonel Cameron, under whose superintendence they were placed, reported that they learned the drill as quickly and as well as any Englishmen, and that they were sober, steady, and attentive to their duties. (The Moors, it should be remarked, are noted for their abstemiousness, the precepts of the Koran which forbid the use of spirits and tobacco being rigidly observed.) This tends to show that Moors, living under a just and humane government, and having, as these men had, proper provision made for their livelihood, are not a lawless or even a disorderly people, and that they are capable of being transformed, under such a form of government as France has established in Algeria and Tunisia, into the splendid warriors which their ancestors were in Spain. It was, as I think I have remarked in the preceding chapter, the knowledge that France, in acquiring Morocco, would obtain the material for a formidable addition to her military forces which was, it is generally believed, one of the motives that inspired Germany's persistent opposition to a French protectorate.