A few words of digression upon the future of Islam may not be out of place here.  The idea of a militant Christendom has vanished from the world.  The last pretensions of Christian propaganda have been buried in the Balkan trenches.  A unification of Africa under Latin auspices carries with it now no threat of missionary invasion.  Africa will be a fair field for all religions, and the religion to which the negro will take will be the religion that best suits his needs.  That religion, we are told by nearly everyone who has a right to speak upon such questions, is Islam, and its natural propagandist is the Arab.  There is no reason why he should not be a Frenchified Arab.

Both the French and the British have the strongest interest in the revival of Arabic culture.  Let the German learn Turkish if it pleases him.  Through all Africa and Western Asia there is a great to-morrow for a renascent Islam under Arab auspices.  Constantinople, that venal city of the waterways, sitting like Asenath at the ford, has corrupted all who came to her; she has been the paralysis of Islam.  But the Islam of the Turk is a different thing from the Islam of the Arab.  That was one of the great progressive impulses in the world of men.  It is our custom to underrate the Arab’s contribution to civilisation quite absurdly in comparison with our debt to the Hebrew and Greek.  It is to the initiatives of Islamic culture, for example, that we owe our numerals, the bulk of modern mathematics, and the science of chemistry.  The British have already set themselves to the establishment of Islamic university teaching in Egypt, but that is the mere first stroke of the pick at the opening of the mine.  English, French, Russian, Arabic, Hindustani, Spanish, Italian; these are the great world languages that most concern the future of civilisation from the point of view of the Peace Alliance that impends.  No country can afford to neglect any of those languages, but as a matter of primary importance I would say, for the British, Hindustani, for the Americans, Russian or Spanish, for the French and Belgians and Italians, Arabic.  These are the directions in which the duty of understanding is most urgent for each of these peoples, and the path of opportunity plainest.

The disposition to underrate temporarily depressed nations, races, and cultures is a most irrational, prevalent, and mischievous form of stupidity.  It distorts our entire outlook towards the future.  The British reader can see its absurdity most easily when he reads the ravings of some patriotic German upon the superiority of the “Teuton” over the Italians and Greeks—­to whom we owe most things of importance in European civilisation.  Equally silly stuff is still to be read in British and American books about “Asiatics.”  And was there not some fearful rubbish, not only in German but in English and French, about the “decadence” of France?  But we are learning—­rapidly.  When I was a student in London thirty years ago we