e sad lot of women in Morocco. Religion itself being all but
denied them in practice, whatever precept provides, it is with blank
astonishment that the majority of them hear the message of those noble
foreign sisters of theirs who have devoted their lives to showing them
a better way. The greatest difficulty is experienced in arousing
in them any sense of individuality, any feeling of personal
responsibility, or any aspiration after good. They are so accustomed
to be treated as cattle, that their higher powers are altogether
dormant, all possibilities of character repressed. The welfare of
their souls is supposed to be assured by union with a Muslim, and few
know even how to pray. Instead of religion, their minds are saturated
with the grossest superstition. If this be the condition of the free
woman, how much worse that of the slave!

The present socially degraded state in which the people live,
and their apparent, though not real, incapacity for progress and
development, is to a great extent the curse entailed by this
brutalization of women. No race can ever rise above the level of its
weaker sex, and till Morocco learns this lesson it will never rise.
The boy may be the father of the man, but the woman is the mother of
the boy, and so controls the destiny of the nation. Nothing can indeed
be hoped for in this country in the way of social progress till the
minds of the men have been raised, and their estimation of women
entirely changed. Though Turkey was so long much in the position in
which Morocco remains to-day, it is a noteworthy fact that as she
steadily progresses in the way of civilization, one of the most
apparent features of this progress is the growing respect for women,
and the increasing liberty which is allowed them, both in public and
private.

VIII

SOCIAL VISITS[4]
[4: Contributed by my wife.--B. M.]

"Every country its customs."

_Moorish Proverb._

"Calling" is not the common, every-day event in Barbary which it has
grown to be in European society. The narrowed-in life of the Moorish
woman of the higher classes, and the strict watch which is kept lest
some other man than her husband should see her, makes a regular
interchange of visits practically impossible. No doubt the Moorish
woman would find them quite as great a burden as her western sister,
and in this particular her ignorance may be greater bliss than her
knowledge. In spite of the paucity of the "calls" she receives or