“Because a true believer would have taken the question as a deadly insult.” “They’d be welcome,” he laughed, “though it is rather irritating to be mistaken for a Jew. I shouldn’t like it myself.” I thought of the dignified Jew traders who had made part of our caravan in the journey from Bagdad to Damascus, and answered, “There is little danger of that.” “I guess not,” he assented. “But if you aren’t a Jew or a Mohammedan, what are you?” He had spoiled my mood, and since it was gone I thought I would amuse myself with the man. “A seeker of knowledge from the Altai Mountains,” I responded. “Never heard of them,” he announced; “or is it your Choctaw for those?” he added, pointing towards the dark masses of the Atlas Mountains. I smiled and answered, “They are many moons’ travel from here.” “Oh!” he exclaimed. “How did you happen to come?” “To follow after those gone before.” “I see,” he said. “Relatives, I suppose? Hope you found them well?” “No,” I replied, carrying on the humor, “dying.” He jingled his coins, and asked, “Anything to be done for them?” “Nothing.” “What’s the complaint?” “Civilization in the abstract, repeating rifles and rapid-firing guns in the concrete.” “Eh!” he ejaculated. Then the lowest and sweetest of voices said, “Won’t you tell us what you mean?” Was it my irritation that the man before me, rather than the subtler-passioned people I knew so well, was the dominant type of the moment, or was it the sympathy your voice stirred within me, which made me speak? In a moment I was sketching broadly the inhumanity of this thing we call Christian civilization, which, more grasping than the Inquisition, has overrun the world, tearing the lands from their owners, and, not content with this spoliation, demands of its victims that they shall give up the customs of many centuries’ evolution, and conform to habits, governments, and religions which their very instincts make impossible; and because they cannot change, but break out, these believers in the golden rule shoot them down. I protested at the mockery of calling civilized a world held at peace by constant slaughter, or of styling the national Jack Ketches of humanity Christian nations! I protested against the right of one man to hold another barbaric because he will not welcome his master, greet with joy the bands of steel we call railroads, and crush his nature within the walls of vast factories, to make himself the threefold slave of society, government, and employer. And finally, I gloried in the fact that though the white races had found a weapon against the black and yellow ones which enabled them to overrun and subjugate, yet nature had provided nature’s people with the defense of climate,—a death-line to the whites; and behind that line the colored races are unconquerable in the sense of conquest being extinction. I knew the other side, that altruistic tenet of political economy defined in brief as “the greatest