I hope the reader is following the thread of my argument. It is the feeling of the East which I would attempt to lay bare. The existence of slavery in these days is the natural outcome of that feeling. Many a child is kept illiterate for no other reason than because its father is illiterate. If the father is a pea-parcher or a bean-roaster, the son must be a pea-parcher or a bean-roaster; for a son is nothing more than a child of its father. This thraldom, to a lad of originality and spirit, is unbearable, but he must either endure it, or else run the risk of being an outcast. Thus the son is the slave of his father. In his turn the father is under the bondage of his spiritual director, who too often serves no other God than Mammon. The tendency of the Muslim, however, is to accept the guidance of his “master” with unquestioning humility. All might go well with him if his “master”--we mean his priest--were always a man to be trusted, and the right man to lead. Unfortunately the Muslim priest more often than not is more unenlightened, more selfish, more avaricious, more unscrupulous than most of his flock, and thus there is a danger of his enslaving the whole fold. Poor sheep, they, believing him to be the shepherd of God, are accustomed to follow him whithersoever he may ensnare them. They are doomed to perish together on the rock of Predestination, unless these “masters” can be brought to revise the interpretation they have put on their Prophet’s teaching. Muhammad, as a matter of fact, was careful not to draw a too narrow line between the scope and the limitations of the human will. There is nothing in his message which need deter a progressive Muslim from accepting the belief that the first step is with him always, and there is no doubt that the acceptance of such a belief by the whole Muslim world would go far to breathe new life into the body politic. For it would give to the imagination an ever-widening vision of human responsibility, of human knowledge, and of human destiny. It would emancipate every race that is proud to pay allegiance to the Prophet, and would make slavery, in its widest as well as in its literal sense, a curse of the unredeemed past. “We know,” says Mr. J. H. Shorthouse, speaking in the words of an oracular voice, addressing the King of Diamonds in a pack of cards, “that we possess a power by which the fall of the cards is systematised and controlled. To a higher intelligence than ours, doubtless, combinations which seem to us inscrutable are as easily analysed and controlled. In proportion as intellect advances we know this to be the case, and these two would seem to run side by side into the infinite--law, and intellect, which perceives law, until we arrive at the insoluble problem whether law is the result of intellect or intellect of law.”