h it found in Northern Africa at the time of its conquests.
The states which border on the Mediterranean had once been powerful and
comparatively enlightened. They had been populous and prosperous. The
Phoenician colony in Carthage had grown to be no mean rival of Rome's
military power. Egypt had been a great centre of learning, not only in
the most ancient times, but especially after the building of Alexandria.
More western lands, like Numidia and Mauritania, had been peopled by
noble races.

After the introduction of Christianity, Alexandria became the bright
focus into which the religions and philosophies of the world poured
their concentrated light. Some of the greatest of the Christian fathers,
like Augustine, Tertullian, and Cyprian, were Africans. The foundations
of Latin Christianity were laid by these men. The Bishopric of Hippo was
a model for all time in deep and intelligent devotion. The grace and
strength, the sublime and all-conquering faith of Monica, and others
like her, furnished a pattern for all Christian womanhood and
motherhood.

I do not forget that before the time of the Mohammedan invasion the
Vandals had done their work of devastation, or that the African Church
had been woefully weakened and rent by wild heresies and schisms, or
that the defection of the Monophysite or Coptic Church of Egypt was one
of the influences which facilitated the Mohammedan success. But making
due allowance for all this, vandalism and schism could not have
destroyed so soon the ancient civilization or sapped the strength of the
North African races. The process which has permanently reduced so many
once populous cities and villages to deserts, and left large portions of
the Barbary States with only the moldering ruins of their former
greatness, has been a gradual one. For centuries after the Arab conquest
those states were virtually shut off from communication with Europe, and
for at least three centuries more, say from 1500 down to the generation
which immediately preceded our own, they were known chiefly by the
piracies which they carried on against the commerce of all maritime
nations. Even the Government of the United States was compelled to pay a
million of dollars for the ransom of captured American seamen, and it
paid it not to private corsairs, but to the Mohammedan governments by
which those piracies were subsidized, as a means of supplying the public
exchequer. These large amounts were recovered only when our