Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with which sensational writers and superficial travellers have invested the subject, it is apparent that the Senussi controls a very wide-spread and powerful organisation—an organisation probably unique in the world. As a fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hardy racing-camel known as _hegin_, and their marvellous knowledge of this great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that they can always retreat to their bases in the desert, where civilised troops cannot follow them, are all advantages of which the Senussi and his followers are thoroughly aware. Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply capable of causing the Italians serious trouble, it is very unlikely that he will prove actively hostile if they refrain from encroaching upon those remote regions which he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands full with the development of the coastal regions for many years to come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the interior of the country severely alone, recognise the religious authority of the Senussi, and, if possible, effect some such working agreement with him as England has done with an equally dangerous neighbour, the Amir of Afghanistan. From the glimpses which I have given you of the inhospitable character of Tripolitania and the still more inhospitable people who inhabit it, it will be seen that Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the Turk. She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started it upon a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as accessible from the mother country as Libya[1] (for we must accustom ourselves to the new name sooner or later) is from Italy. But if Italy is to be a success as a colonising nation she must school herself to do things differently in Tripolitania from what she has in her other African dependencies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. [1] The Italians have given their new possession the historic name of Libya. First and foremost, she must pick the men who are to settle her new colony as carefully as she picks the men for her _carabinieri_, choosing them with a view to their intelligence, industry, energy, and sobriety, for to flood Tripolitania with such a class of emigrants as every vessel from Italy dumps on our hospitable shores is but to invite disaster.