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Its geographical formula is familiar to you all, with the same distribution of rain fall between plain and mountainous regions, the same division of the handicraft arts in mountainous Spain of the north and of a 15 inch rainfall, the same source of food supply in the wheat fields of the elevated plateau, and the same historical succession of eruptions across the Pyrenees which have furnished a ruling race for the Iberian substratum of the peninsula, Gallic, Roman, Visi-Goth, Provencal, and so on, through the reigning houses of Spain, Aragon, Navarre, Hapsburg, Bourbon.

The first great onset on Spain from Africa came under Punic Semitic generals, of whom the greatest was Hannibal, who owed all his line, the only line which ever destroyed the Roman legion in the open field, to the mountaineers of north Africa. Under Rome forays from north Africa began, as inscriptions in the reign of Marcus Aurelius show. After many lesser invasions, they culminated in the first conquest in the ninth century, and again of Moorish mountaineers led by Semitic Arab generals. The next wave of conquest came under Yusuf Taschfyn Al Mohades, who came from beyond the Atlas and entered Spain in the same century which saw William enter the British islands and the wide redistribution of power which accompanied the maritime or semi-maritime expeditions of the eleventh century. The next great wave, Al Mohades, followed in the fourteenth century, and the last, omitting lesser movements in Morocco, was headed by the Filali sharifs, the founders of the present dynasty, who came, like all their predecessors in the conquest of Morocco, from south of the Atlas to occupy the two great divisions of Morocco, the southern which circles about Morocco City, and the northern, which has its twin capitals of Fez and Mequinez.

This sovereignty however through all the thousand years in which it has existed under one family or another has never presented itself to any Mohammedan, Arab or Berber, in those terms of exact, complete and exclusive rule which are the product of Roman and European law. Morocco is almost alone among Moslem lands in having been converted, after the brief occupation of the coast by Musa, by mission

ary effort. The descendant of Mohammed, Idris, grandson of Ali, who reached Morocco in the ninth century and founded Fez, carried on a peaceful propaganda. Exactly as in Germany it is possible to distinguish between the regions won by the sword for Christianity and those acquired by conversion by the circumstance that in the latter old heathen shrines remain re-baptized and changed, so in Morocco, after passing the narrow litoral which fronts on the Mediterranean and going south of Fez, one finds the perpetual proof that the earlier shrines were changed to Moslem saints without shock. The whole land is therefore essentially Moslem. Its village tribes, even villages of the plain, and the whole body of dwellers gathered in the cities, do not look upon the Sultan as sovereign in our jural sense. He is instead, being as he always has been through the female line from the beginning under all dynasties of the blood and descent of Mohammed, the head of Moslems for the purpose of conducting war with infidels, preserving a general order, and acting as the religious head of the nation. This carries with it a wide exercise of despotic power ruthlessly exercised. But this is incidental. In theory, for any man learned in the strait sect of Mohammedan law which obtains in Morocco, the Malekite interpretation of the Koran, believers are equal; they pay a common contribution to the makhzen, or treasurer. This is in the hand of the descendant of the Prophet, who for the time being has been selected by the acclamation of the Mosque and the use of his name in prayer in the great sanctuaries of the land as Sultan, Caliph and keeper of the treasury of the faithful, commander of the believers, Emir el Moumenin. It was but the other day that a sultan was deposed by the ancient prescribed method of a man rising among the worshipers in the great mosque in Fez, leading in prayer, and when the prayer for the ruler came, substituting a new name. When the believers around joined in the supplication, the change was legally made and accepted by a proscriptive election. For Moslem law is almost alone in furnishing from the beginning a settled method by which a change of ruler can be made.

All diplomatic relations therefore, down to the capture

of Granada and the final conquest of Andalous, were conducted on even terms, wholly lacking, as the various treaties and documents show, in the diplomatic relations between the Sublime Porte and the Christian nations about its boundaries who for four centuries watched what seemed to be the invincible advancing tide of Turkish conquest. Rapine, massacre, battle and war went on through all the period, but there was between Christian and Moslem a mutual relation which never existed in the eastern Mediterranean. These even handed diplomatic relations were suddenly and perpetually changed by the merciless persecution which constitutes a little known chapter of that great period of reaction when Spain led in rolling back into central Europe the tide of Protestantism, and in the south the remains of past Mohammedan invasion. There is a sense-not always clearly remembered-in which this movement was in no fanciful interpretation a re-conquest by the great adminis·trative machine bequeathed by Rome of territories which the northern tribes had occupied in Europe and the southern invasion had seized in the Iberian peninsula. The 16th century in Spain, from the time when the first decrees against the Moriscoes were pronounced until their final expulsion by Philip IV and Larma, his minister, in 1618, was marked by the breach of treaties, the disregard of solemn covenants and capitulations, the ruthless barbarity, the pitiless persecution, and at last the summary deportation of nearly half a million men, women and children from Spain to north Africa, including among them some Christians who had the pitiable fate of being driven from Spain because of their Moorish descent and stoned to death in north Morocco because they refused to deny the Christ whose followers had persecuted and driven them from homes held longer than any American settlement. This century of persecution running through all the fifteen hundreds, attended on both sides by the stream of savage barbarity, of prisoners becoming slaves, no quarter being given, every Moor and every Christian in fight remembering the torture, the barbarous torture, with which his fellows had been treated by the

enemy, dug the deep pit of measureless hate which separated and still separates Moslem and Christian in northwestern Africa. For nearly two hundred years 1600 to 1800 the entire diplomatic relations between European powers and the varying authorities which held the coast of Morocco and preserved a precarious sovereignty in the interior, were embraced in treaties which provided for the release of Christian captives held in slavery at the various ports of Morocco, as well as the other north African states. These various treaties, all on the same line, all providing for ransom, were fostered long after they were really needed, because it was the open and avowed policy of the maritime nations of the Mediterranean, led by England, to discourage any flag but their own by making the sea perilous to all other flags through the frank recognition of Moorish piracy. There are still, near Mequinez, whole villages inhabited by the descendants of Christian captives long since become Moslem. One who mixes much with the Moor in the market place with a knowledge of the language is perpetually coming across names in the cities which recall this origin. They have long since been lost in the population save for an occasional agnomen, for while the Spanish Christian visited the penalty of Moorish birth upon the convert to the third and fourth generation of those who believed and worshiped with him, the Mohammedan gives to all the rights of Moslem citizenship the newest convert.

Our own diplomacy a century ago and our own prowess, repeating under another flag the daring deeds of the blood of those who sailed with Drake when he fought forts with ships and burned vessels in the harbors of north Africa, accomplished a great change by which all the north African ports, including Morocco, surrendered piracy and guaranteed the safety of peaceful vessels. Yet even I in early boyhood sailed on an American clipper vessel provided with two little guns, the crew being called to quarters and trained in their use because of the possibility of being picked up during some calm by Riffian pirates off the coast of north Morocco, while there is probably more than one in

my audience who remember like myself meeting those on Cape Cod who had made their scanty contribution to ransom American sailors captive in Morocco.

With the treaties negotiated in the early part of the 19th century abolishing piracy there came the opening of the present and concluding chapter of diplomatic relations with Morocco, begun a century ago with the treaties which Mulai Soliman (1794-1822), a ruthless and powerful conqueror of the old type, negotiated with the different European powers. From Morocco Christian residents had been as completely excluded as from any central Asiatic khanates. A periodical trip under guard by a European ambassador to the Court of the Sultan was the only travel permitted to a European. The residence of foreign representatives was jealously restricted to Tangiers, and in the coast cities particularly at Mogador and Mazazan there was a little quarter on the water side walled and gated which precisely repeated conditions of the Hongs in Canton and elsewhere, through which Chinese trade was carried on in the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. But centuries of experience had made the Moorish administration familiar with the principles of exterritorialty as embraced in the capitulations. All the Jewish communities in Morocco, which began with the first dawn of Mohammedanism lived apart under their own laws. The site of the great mosque at Fez was bought from a Jew, following the example of the Prophet himself. The treaties with Europe continued therefore the principle of exterritoriality or accepted it as a part of the common law of foreign contact. This was the easier because there still existed and exists in Morocco that personal jurisdiction which in mediæval times was universal all over Europe and guided the trader from the little place on the Thames which still carries the name of the Hansiatic League in some of its streets to the Arab Khans in Chinese ports, preceding by centuries the later warehouses of European merchants.

Diplomatic relations began in the modern sense therefore with Morocco under the same general lines of international law which guided them in negotiation with the Sublime

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