regarded Japan as a fantastic joke; the comic opera, The Mikado, still preserves that foolish phase for the admiration of posterity.  And to-day there is a quite unjustifiable tendency to ignore the quality of the Arab and of his religion.  Islam is an open-air religion, noble and simple in its broad conceptions; it is none the less vital from Nigeria to China because it has sickened in the closeness of Constantinople.  The French, the Italians, the British have to reckon with Islam and the Arab; where the continental deserts are, there the Arabs are and there is Islam; their culture will never be destroyed and replaced over these regions by Europeanism.  The Allies who prepare the Peace of the World have to make their peace with that.  And when I foreshadow this necessary liaison of the French and Arabic cultures, I am thinking not only of the Arab that is, but of the Arab that is to come.  The whole trend of events in Asia Minor, the breaking up and decapitation of the Ottoman Empire and the Euphrates invasion, points to a great revival of Mesopotamia—­at first under European direction.  The vast system of irrigation that was destroyed by the Mongol armies of Hulugu in the thirteenth century will be restored; the desert will again become populous.  But the local type will prevail.  The new population of Mesopotamia will be neither European nor Indian; it will be Arabic; and with its concentration Arabic will lay hold of the printing press.  A new intellectual movement in Islam, a renascent Bagdad, is as inevitable as is 1950.

I have, however, gone a little beyond the discussion of the future of the barbaric possessions in these anticipations of an Arabic co-operation with the Latin peoples in the reconstruction of Western Asia and the barbaric regions of north and central Africa.  But regions of administered barbarism occur not only in Africa.  The point is that they are administered, and that their economic development is very largely in the hands, and will for many generations remain in the hands, of the possessing country.  Hitherto their administration has been in the interests of the possessing nation alone.  Their acquisition has been a matter of bitter rivalries, their continued administration upon exclusive lines is bound to lead to dangerous clashings.  The common sense of the situation points to a policy of give and take, in which throughout the possessions of all the Pledged Allies, the citizens of all will have more or less equal civil advantages.  And this means some consolidation of the general control of those Administered Territories.  I have already hinted at the possibility that the now exclusively British navy may some day be a world-navy controlled by an Admiralty representing a group of allies, Australasia, Canada, Britain and, it may be, France and Russia and the United States.  To those who know how detached the British Admiralty is at the present time from the general methods of British political life, there will be nothing strange in this idea of its completer detachment.  Its personnel does to a large extent constitute a class apart.  It takes its boys out of the general life very often before they have got to their fourteenth birthday.  It is not so closely linked up with specific British social elements, with political parties and the general educational system, as are the rest of the national services.