I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become the fashion among those travellers who confine their investigations of African life to the lanes about Mustapha Supérieur, to the _souks_ of Tunis, and to the alleys back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, however—though this the European officials will, for reasons of policy, stoutly deny—slavery not only exists _sub rosa_ in Algeria and Tunisia and in Egypt, but slave markets are still openly maintained in the inland towns of Morocco and Tripolitania, the French and Italian occupations notwithstanding. When a wealthy Moslem wants slaves nowadays he does not send traders to Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to one of the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoli, or Trebizond, a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the ceremonies of legal wedlock are gone through by proxy. By resorting to these fictitious marriages and similar subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once they are within the walls of his house, no one can possibly interfere to release them, for, the police being under no conditions permitted to violate the privacy of a harem, there is obviously no safeguard for the liberty, or even the lives, of its inmates. As a result of this system, a constant stream of female slaves—fair-haired beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria—trickles into the North African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and, though the European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of things, they are powerless to end it. The women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their masters. If that is not slavery, I don't know what is.