she can, indeed, claim her dower—­her hire, as it is called in the too plain language of the Koran; but the knowledge that the wife can make this claim is at the best a miserable security against capricious taste; and in the case of bondmaids even that imperfect check is wanting.  The power of divorce is not the only power that may be exercised by the tyrannical husband.  Authority to confine and to beat his wives is distinctly vested in his discretion.[72] “Thus restrained, secluded, degraded, the mere minister of enjoyment, liable at the caprice or passion of the moment to be turned adrift, it would be hard to say that the position of a wife was improved by the code of Mohammed."[73] Even if the privilege of divorce and marital tyranny be not exercised, the knowledge of its existence as a potential right must tend to abate the self-respect, and in like degree to weaken the influence of the sex, impairing thus the ameliorating and civilizing power which she was meant to exercise upon mankind.  And the evil has been stereotyped by the Koran for all time.

[Sidenote:  Principal Fairbairn on home-life under Islam.] I must quote one more passage from Principal Fairbairn on the lowering influence of Moslem domestic life: 

The God of Mohammed ... “spares the sins the Arab loves.  A religion that does not purify the home cannot regenerate the race; one that depraves the home is certain to deprave humanity.  Motherhood is to be sacred if manhood is to be honorable.  Spoil the wife of sanctity and for the man the sanctities of life have perished.  And so it has been with Islam.  It has reformed and lifted savage tribes; it has depraved and barbarized civilized nations.  At the root of its fairest culture a worm has ever lived that has caused its blossoms soon to wither and die.  Were Mohammed the hope of man, then his state were hopeless; before him could only be retrogression, tyranny, and despair."[74]

[Sidenote:  Demoralizing influence of servile concubinage.] Still worse is the influence of servile concubinage.  The following is the evidence of a shrewd and able observer in the East: 

All zenana life must be bad for men at all stages of their existence....  In youth it must be ruin to be petted and spoiled by a company of submissive slave-girls.  In manhood it is no less an evil that when a man enters into private life his affections should be put up to auction among foolish, fond competitors full of mutual jealousies and slanders.  We are not left entirely to conjecture as to the effect of female influence on home-life when it is exerted under these unenlightened and demoralizing conditions.  That is plainly an element lying at the root of all the most important features that differentiate progress from stagnation.[75]

[Sidenote:  Deteriorating influence of relations established between the sexes.] Such are the institutions which gnaw at the root of Islam and prevent the growth