If Egypt has shown a higher degree of advancement it has been due to her peculiar geographical position, to the inexhaustible fertility of the Delta, and, most of all, to the infusion of foreign life and energy into the management of her affairs.  Ambitious adventurers, like the Albanian Mehamet Ali, have risen to power and have made Egypt what she is, or rather what she was before the more recent intervention of the European powers.  Even Canon Taylor admits that for centuries it has been necessary to import more vigorous foreign blood for the administration of Egyptian affairs.[115]

It will be admitted that Mohammedan conquests have been made in mediaeval times, and down to our own age, in Central Africa, and that along the southern borders of Sahara a cordon of more or less prosperous states has been established; also, that the civilization of those states contrasts favorably with the savagery of the cannibal tribes with which they have come in contact.  Probably the best—­that is to say, the least objectionable—­exemplifications of Islam now to be found in the world are seen in some of the older states of Western Soudan.  The Mandingo of the central uplands furnished a better material than the “unspeakable Turk,” and it would not be quite fair to ascribe all his present virtues to the Moslem rule.

But how have these conquests in Central Africa been made?  The contention of the apologists for Islam is that recently, at least, and probably more or less in the past, a quiet missionary work has greatly extended monotheism, temperance, education, and general comfort, and that it has done more than all other influences for the permanent extinction of the slave trade!  Dr. E.W.  Blyden, in answer to the charge that Mohammedan Arabs are now, and long have been, chiefly responsible for the horrors of that trade, and that even when Americans bought slaves for their plantations, Moslem raiders in the interior instigated the tribal quarrels which supplied the markets on the coast, contends that the Moslem conquests do most effectually destroy the trade, since tribes which have become Moslem can no longer be enslaved by Moslems.[116] It is a curious argument, especially as it seems to ignore the fact that at the present time both the supply and the demand depend on Mohammedan influence.

As to the means by which the Soudanese States are now extending their power we may content ourselves with a mere reference to the operations of the late “El Mahdi” in the East and the notorious Samadu in the West.  Their methods may be accepted as illustrations of a kind of tactics which have been employed for ages.  The career of El Mahdi is already well known.  Samadu was originally a prisoner, captured while yet a boy in one of the tribal wars near the headwaters of the Niger.  Partly by intrigue and partly by the aid of his religious fanaticism he at length became sufficiently powerful to enslave his master.  Soon afterward he proclaimed his