who being dead yet speaketh, are a
plea for more workers to come out to Arabia. Marion Wells Thoms, M. D.,
labored for five years in Arabia and wrote in one of her last letters as
follows:

"The Mohammedan religion has done much to degrade womanhood. To be sure,
female infanticide formerly practised by the heathen Arabs was
abolished by Islam, but that death was not so terrible as the living
death of thousands of the Arab women who have lived since the reign of
the 'merciful' prophet, nor was its effect upon society in general so
demoralizing. In the 'time of ignorance,' that is time before Mohammed,
women often occupied positions of honor. There were celebrated poetesses
and we read of Arab queens ruling their tribes.

"Such a state of things does not exist to-day, but the woman's
influence, though never recognized by the men, is nevertheless
indirectly a potent factor, but never of a broadening or uplifting
character. To have been long regarded as naturally evil has had a
degrading influence. Mohammedan classical writers have done their best
to revile womanhood. 'May Allah never bless womankind' is a quotation
from one of them.

"Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a worthier
estimation of womanhood, but the later view, which comes more and more
into prevalence, is the only one which finds its expression in the
sacred tradition, which represents hell as full of women, and refuses to
acknowledge in its women, apart from rare exceptions, either reason or
religion, in poems which refer all the evil in the world to the woman as
its root, in proverbs which represent a careful education of girls as
mere waste.

"When the learned ones ascribe such characteristics to women, is it any
wonder that they have come to regard themselves as mere beasts of
burden? The Arab boy spends ten or twelve years of his life largely in
the women's quarters, listening to their idle conversation about
household affairs and their worse than idle talk about their jealousies
and intrigues.

"When the boy becomes a man, although he has absolute dominion over his
wife as far as the right to punish or divorce her is concerned, he often
yields to her decision in regard to some line of action. In treating a
woman I have sometimes appealed to the husband to prevail upon his wife
to consent to more severe treatment than she was willing to receive.
After conversing with his wife his answer has been, 'She will not
consent,'