battle personally, in order to encourage his followers, but carried no weapon of war. He forbade the slaughter of non-belligerents, the burning of cornfields, and the cutting down of fruit trees; cruelty to prisoners, or mutilation of the dead; practices from which his adversaries did not abstain. When his followers were martyred, or threatened with death for their religion-when his ambassadors were killed-he was, like other chiefs of nations, drawn into inevitable war; but he did not prolong war through ambition, but made peace as soon as it could give a hope of permanence. Sir W. Muir asserts that to the permanence of Islâm a continuous aggressive course was essential, and that its claim to universal supremacy could only be enforced at the point of the sword. Syed Ameer Ali insists that this ambition has no justification from the Prophet, but has its parallel in all other creeds, whose professors have been persecuting and aggressive. He asserts that Islâm has not been more aggressive than the votaries of other creeds; and, in spite of the ferocious barbarism of African Mussulmans, we do not see that his assertion can be rebutted. But his own co-religionist Syed Ahmed Khan (he says) seems to admit that Mohammedanism grasped the sword to proclaim the eternal truth-the Unity of the Godhead-which Syed Ameer Ali totally denies; but adds, 'Islâm never interfered with the dogmas of any moral faith,' which may seem to leave a loophole. He finds it very easy to recriminate on Christendom for its wars of religion and frightful persecutions both of other Christians and of innocent foreigners; but he has a difficult task in denying that the Prophet proclaimed war against idolaters as such. Indeed, of two passages quoted by our author from the Korân one seems to go against

him. The former is (p. 198), 'Defend yourself against your enemies in the war of enterprise for the Religion, but attack them not: God hateth the aggressor.' The other (p. 210), Fight for the religion of God against those who fight against you; but transgress not (by attacking them first); for God loveth not the transgressors. If they attack you, slay them; but if they desist, let there be no hostility, except against the ungodly.'

was

It must be received as historical, and is admitted by Christian opponents of Mohammed, that in his age the idolatry of Arabs coupled with impure doctrines and lascivious practices; of which sufficient hint is given us in the classical religions of Syria and of Babylon, to say nothing of more distant Greece. No wise Christian ruler would allow such impurities, under cover of a religious name, to propagate themselves over the area which he controlled; and the line which separates this conduct from that of warring from Jerusalem to suppress impure idolatry in Samaria, or warring from Medina to suppress it in Mecca, is certainly very delicate. Our reason for sternly prohibiting wars to suppress moral impurities which are beyond our own frontier is not that it is wrong to suppress them by violence, for it is well that they should be so suppressed by authorities on the spot. But experience tells us that ambition will never want specious pretexts for aggression, if one power is thus to interfere on the area of another. The moral state of the two never with us differs so gravely but that the demoralisation incident to war is a remedy worse than the disease. But in an extreme case, where inhumanity and impurity were installed into the high places of national honour, such a people would seem to put itself out of the pale of diplomacy, and a neighbour powerful enough to crush

the moral mischief without permanent evil from the war would probably be applauded in the deed. It is, perhaps, fair to view Mohammed's war upon Arabian idolatry in this light, especially since the consolidation of tribes extirpated border war, and was all on the side of humanity. It may be hard by any mere reasoning to hinder an undue extension of the precedent; probably impossible, while a Mussulman power is confronted by no equal rival: and the same may be said of all nations, whatever their creed. None have been virtuous enough to be able to dispense with that wholesome restraint of equals which Thucydides quaintly describes 25 ισοπαλὲς δέος.

When the Khalifs were once launched on a victorious career, backed by armies full of enthusiasm and mutual trust, veterans in war, they must have been wiser and better than men, had they not been carried into unlimited aggression. The English merchants in India were entangled, at first greatly against their will, in wars purely defensive; but after full experience of their own military superiority, their actual leaders courted fresh combats, and precisely when native princes did not want to fight they in turn found war to be inevitable. It is thus that uniform success prompts ambition, and drives into systematic aggression the power which at first desired nothing but defence. When it has been thus with Christians, and is not held to stain the sanctity of the religion itself, justice requires that we judge in the same way of Islâm.

Not but that it is an unhappy phenomenon that the warlike and aggressive conduct of Islâm stands in direct connection of time and space with the career of its founder, so as to appear as a legitimate carrying on of his principles and practice. No Christian aggressors can fancy that they are obeying the

precepts of Jesus in invading their neighbours. A Mussulman power has (if possible) still more need than we of external restraints; which, however, are abundantly supplied now in Asia. Only in Africa is Mohammedan fanaticism rampant.

Alike the Ottomans,

the Persians, and the Indian Moslems have forcible teachers from without, who will strengthen the hands of such mild interpreters as Syed Ameer Ali and Syed Ahmed Khan; and (in the cause of humanity let us hope!) will postpone, until it becomes impossible, the warlike struggle of Cross and Crescent.

This little book may be read with much pleasure. The author is a young man, and his mind has travelled over a great surface of history and philosophy. He has tried to get at the best authorities and the most novel learning. It is only to be expected that his versions of Western history do not always commend themselves to us. This remark does not bear upon his severe and caustic lashing of Christian powers and Christian churches for their enormous and habitual violation of the first principles taught by their Founder. Christians are so accustomed to be thus attacked by Christians that it seems to do them no good; when the same attack comes from a Mohammedan, or Hindoo we may hope for some result. But there is an air of omniscience in his broad treatment, which neither pleases nor convinces us, in dealing with ages most imperfectly known. Nations were not so wholly miserable nor so wholly wicked as they seem in the retrospect. When he speaks of the Persians (page 9) he strangely identifies 'Ardishir Babekân, founder of the Sassanid dynasty,' with Artaxerxes Longimanus, of the Achæmenian dynasty; and presently (apparently still speaking of the Sassanidae) he

says that Bahman Ardishîr was Artaxerxes Mnemon, quoting Arabian authorities for it in his note, where he adds, 'Artaxerxes Mnemon was the brother of Cyrus the younger, the hero of Xenophon.' The modern Persians, and naturally such Arabians as depend on them, are utterly in the dark as to the Achæmenian dynasty, and, as Sir John Malcolm remarks, equally of the Sassanida; but our author is in general very attentive to chronology.

Our readers will take interest in knowing what he regards to have been the Three Great Evils which have befallen humanity.' The third was the victory of Charles Martel in the week-long battles around Tours over the invading Moors of Spain. He can eloquently recount the enormities of the Spanish Inquisition, and of the Spaniards in the New World and in the far East, and claims for the Moors that they have been the truest and mildest civilisers of Spain. The second calamity is the unsuccessful siege of Constantinople by the Saracens in the eighth century. Its failure made the Crusades possible, continued the moral and religious downfall of the Greek empire, and delayed the religious reform of the Christian Church by centuries. It is instructive to hear a Moslem comment on these matters, and we cannot wonder that he should regard the military defeats of Islâm as pure disaster to humanity. But what (it will be asked) was the first calamity? Had we had to guess, we might have said, He must mean the success of Tartar nations, a comparatively stolid race, against the more intelligent Arabs. Syed Ameer Ali must have some secret hypothesis to account for the decline of Moslem powers he does not explain himself on this: perhaps he is unwilling to affront the Turksbut no the first calamity is the

repulse of Xerxes by the Greeks! He is blind to that which to us is an axiom, that this repulse quickened into genius all the slumbering faculties of Athens, and made Greece the intellectual teacher of Europe, and indeed (as to astronomy and metaphysics) of Arabia. Had Xerxes prevailed, Athens would never have surpassed Miletus. Greek degeneracy would have come centuries earlier. Nay, but he tells us, 'Had Persia succeeded in amalgamating Greece with herself, the result only partially attained by the Hellenic upheaval under Alexander would have been attained centuries [one century and a half?] earlier.' But what result? Alexander's conquest of Persia struck the knell to all genius in Greece. It cast her under despotism and mercenary armies. The military quarrels which followed his death did allow flickerings of freedom in Greece; but, alike to Greece or to Asia, it seems obvious and certain that the mischief of Alexander's career consisted in its being a virtual conquest of Greece by Asia: for the vast resources of Asia were used by Macedonian captains, ignorant and careless of Greek freedom and Greek culture, to subdue Hellenism in its own home. If Asia had been acquired in the course of three or four generations by a series of Macedonian aggressions, such as a cautious Philip would have made, Greek freedom, possibly, might have accompanied it: then Greece would really have conquered Persia. But the contrary was the case. Poor Greece, crushed by the Macedonian incubus, and unable to resist her own ruder tribes, declined and wasted, till nothing was left but the misery of absorption into Rome. When Syed Ameer Ali takes so black a view of Persia before the era of Islâm, we are truly astonished at his lamentations over the repulse of Persian arms.

Perhaps this notice ought not to