of
every woman he desired; the adulation was, as I have said, almost
religious worship."[99]

But, it may be asked, what about the poor man, exploited by this
hierarchy of capricious despots? What had he to gain from all this?
Well, in most cases, he got nothing at all; but he _might_ gain a great
deal. Life in the old Orient was a gigantic lottery. Any one, however
humble, who chanced to please a great man, might rise to fame and
fortune at a bound. And this is just what pleases the Eastern
temperament; for in the East, "luck" and caprice are more prized than
the "security" cherished in the West. In the Orient the favourite
stories are those narrating sudden and amazing shifts of
fortune--beggars become viziers or viziers become beggars, and all in a
single night. To the majority of Orientals it is still the uncertainties
of life, and the capricious favour of the powerful, which make it most
worth living; not the sure reward of honesty and well-regulated labour.
All these things made the life of the Orient infinitely _interesting_
to _all_. And it is precisely this gambler's interest which
Westernization has more or less destroyed. As an English writer very
justly remarks _a propos_ of modern Egypt: "Our rule may be perfect, but
the East finds it dull. The old order was a ragged garment, but it was
gay. Its very vicissitude had a charm. 'Ah! yes,' said an Egyptian to a
champion of English rule, 'but in the old days a beggar might sit at the
gate, and if he were found pleasing in the eyes of a great lady, he
might be a great man on the morrow.' There is a natural and inevitable
regret for the gorgeous and perilous past, when favour took the place of
justice, and life had great heights and depths--for the Egypt of Joseph,
Haroun-al-Rashid, and Ismail Pasha. We have spread the coat of
broadcloth over the radiant garment."[100]

Saddened and irritated by the threatened loss of so much that they hold
dear, it is not strange that many Eastern conservatives glorify the past
as a sort of Golden Age, infinitely superior to anything the West can
produce, and in this they are joined by many quondam liberals,
disillusioned with Westernism and flying into the arms of reaction. The
result is a spirit of hatred against everything Western, which sometimes
assumes the most extravagant forms. Says Louis Bertrand: "During a
lecture that I attended at Cairo the speaker contended that France owed
Islam (1) its civilization and sciences;