arth."

He smiled, and shook his head indulgently, as a father to a child who
sets up his childish judgment against that of his elders.

Then I set out to prove my point. I told him of our cities, of our
army, of our great navy. He came right back at me asking for figures,
and when he was done I had to admit that only in our navy were we
numerically superior.

Menelek XIV is the undisputed ruler of all the continent of Africa, of
all of ancient Europe except the British Isles, Scandinavia, and
eastern Russia, and has large possessions and prosperous colonies in
what once were Arabia and Turkey in Asia.

He has a standing army of ten million men, and his people possess
slaves--white slaves--to the number of ten or fifteen million.

Colonel Belik was much surprised, however, upon his part to learn of
the great nation which lay across the ocean, and when he found that I
was a naval officer, he was inclined to accord me even greater
consideration than formerly. It was difficult for him to believe my
assertion that there were but few blacks in my country, and that these
occupied a lower social plane than the whites.

Just the reverse is true in Colonel Belik's land. He considered whites
inferior beings, creatures of a lower order, and assuring me that even
the few white freemen of Abyssinia were never accorded anything
approximating a position of social equality with the blacks. They live
in the poorer districts of the cities, in little white colonies, and a
black who marries a white is socially ostracized.

The arms and ammunition of the Abyssinians are greatly inferior to
ours, yet they are tremendously effective against the ill-armed
barbarians of Europe. Their rifles are of a type similar to the
magazine rifles of twentieth century Pan-America, but carrying only
five cartridges in the magazine, in addition to the one in the chamber.
They are of extraordinary length, even those of the cavalry, and are of
extreme accuracy.

The Abyssinians themselves are a fine looking race of black men--tall,
muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline
distinctly toward Semitic mold--I refer to the full-blooded natives of
Abyssinia. They are the patricians--the aristocracy. The army is
officered almost exclusively by them. Among the soldiery a lower type
of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses.
These men are recruited, so the colonel told me, from among the
conquered tribes