counted on as existing in the counsels of the present Cabinet. Indeed,
as regards the Cabinet, the reverse may very well be the case. We know
how suspicious English politicians are of policies which may be
denounced by their enemies as speculative; and it is quite possible that
the very magnitude of the problem to be solved in considering the future
of Islam may have caused it to be put aside there as one "outside the
sphere of practical politics." The phrase is a convenient one, and is
much used by those in power amongst us who would evade the labour or the
responsibility of great decisions. Yet that such a problem exists in a
new and very serious form I do not hesitate to affirm, nor will my
proposition, as I think, be doubted by any who have mingled much in the
last few years with the Mussulman populations of Western Asia. There it
is easily discernible that great changes are impending, changes perhaps
analogous to those which Christendom underwent four hundred years ago,
and that a new departure is urgently demanded of England if she would
maintain even for a few years her position as the guide and arbiter of
Asiatic progress.

It was not altogether without the design of gaining more accurate
knowledge than I could find elsewhere on the subject of this Mohammedan
revival that I visited Jeddah in the early part of the past winter, and
that I subsequently spent some months in Egypt and Syria in the almost
exclusive society of Mussulmans. Jeddah, I argued, the seaport of Mecca
and only forty miles distant from that famous centre of the Moslem
universe, would be the most convenient spot from which I could obtain
such a bird's-eye view of Islam as I was in search of; and I imagined
rightly that I should there find myself in an atmosphere less provincial
than that of Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople.

Jeddah is indeed in the pilgrim season the suburb of a great metropolis,