'For centuries it had had a fair field for developing its principles and exhibiting its spirit under the most favourable circumstances of climate, soil, natural resources, geographical position, together with a variety of races, unsurpassed in Christendom in all the qualities which go to the making of capable citizens.... And what is the result? Barbarism, oppression, lawlessness, corruption, cruelty, ignorance, decadence, have settled like an incurable blight on all the lands of Islam. There is no exception, not a single bright spot anywhere; no green oasis in all that wilderness of savage desolation. And those lands were once fertile, populous and flourishing homes of the arts, of science, and of literature! ... What became of these rich and civilized lands under Islam? Let the degraded, impoverished, and savage condition of Persia and the Khanites of Central Asia answer. Every vestige has disappeared of their flourishing condition before Islam invaded them. It exterminated all alien influences, gave free scope to its own spirit, and we see the result.' As it is not possible to cover the whole field, let us take a closer look at the three Moslem empires of to-day, where Islam has for long years held undisputed sway. First, then, let us see Islam in the {120} Turkish Empire, ruling from Constantinople, the successor of Baghdad. What is the story of the rule of the Moslem there? Again we will consult unprejudiced witnesses. Professor Freeman, the historian, says of him: 'His rule during all that time has been the rule of cruelty, faithlessness, and brutal lust: it has not been government, but organized brigandage.... While all other nations get better, the Turk gets worse and worse.'[3] Or again, Mr. Bosworth Smith, most determined of apologists of Mohammed and Mohammedanism, is forced to admit that 'the system of government, never an enlightened one, has, at all events since the so-called reforms of the Sultan Mahmoud, been rotten at the core. Stamboul has become an asylum for the rascality of East and West alike; the finest peasantry in the world, the inhabitants of Asia Minor, are dying by starvation, partly, no doubt, owing to bad harvests, but still more owing to the neglect of the most ordinary precautions and duties of Government. Roads unmade, bridges broken down, mines unworked, unprincipled and exorbitant provincial Pashas, wastefulness and disorder and excessive {121} centralization--such is the picture which travellers give us of these fair regions of the earth, and, unfortunately, we know it to be a true picture.'[4]