inople will be
replaced by Cairo or Mecca, and the Tartar by the Arab--an exchange
which, intellectually considered, no lover of Islam need deplore.

One great result the fall of Constantinople certainly will have, which I
believe will be a beneficial one. It will give to Mohammedanism a more
distinctly religious character than it has for many centuries possessed,
and by forcing believers to depend upon spiritual instead of temporal
arms will restore to them, more than any political victories could do,
their lost moral life. Even independently of considerations of race as
between Turk and Arab, I believe that the fall of the Mussulman Empire,
as a great temporal dominion, would relieve Islam of a burden of
sovereignty which she is no longer able in the face of the modern world
to support. She would escape the stigma of political depravity now
clinging to her, and her aims would be simplified and intensified. I
have already stated my opinion that it is to Arabia that Mussulmans must
in the future look for a centre of their religious system, and a return
of their Caliphate to Mecca will signify more than a mere political
change. It is obvious that empire will be there impossible in the sense
given to it at Constantinople, and that the display of armies and the
mundane glory of vast palaces and crowds of slaves will be altogether
out of place.

The Caliph of the future, in whatever city he may fix his abode, will be
chiefly a spiritual and not a temporal king, and will be limited in the
exercise of his authority by few conditions of the existing material
kind. He will be spared the burden of despotic government, the odium of
tax-gathering and conscription over unwilling populations, the constant
struggle to maintain his authority in arms, and the as constant intrigue
against rival Mohammedan princes. It is probable that all these would
readily acknowledge the nominal sovereignty of a Caliph who could not
pretend to coerce them physically, and that the spiritual allegiance of
orthodox believers everywhere would accrue to him as other Mohammedan
sovereignty relaxed its hold. Thus the dream of what is called
Pan-islamism may yet be fulfilled, though in another form from that in
which it is now presented to the faithful by Abd el Hamid and the Ulema
of Constantinople.

That Islam in this spiritual form may achieve more notable triumphs than
by arms in Eastern and Southern Asia we may well believe, and even that
it may estab