The Last Frontier

abs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which b

a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian a

who included the captured territory within their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana-whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of th

cessfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace o

Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries-less than five hundred men in all-he set out under the

fanatic, turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants to the square mile-that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of co

or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a mutes-sarif directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-

he fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad date and olive p

ria and Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as "the granary of Europe." What has been done once may well be done again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic

N THE GRE

that is at all comparable with a Saharan sunris

ng the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an inextricably mi

long, winding valley, extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all of these sand-su

and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian fellaheen were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments

edious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim alleys and byways, along whic

e Romans in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried in débris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its arches ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in dried fish. In that defaced and degraded memorial is typified the latter-day history of Tripolitania. Before the Italian occupation disrupted the commerce of the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by long odds the most interesting of

t, long carried British cottons and German jack-knives to the natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, then, that, fired by the speeches of the expansionists in the Roman senate, all Italy should dream of a day when the red-white-and-green banner should float over this gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton goods from Milan, should go rolling southward to those countries which lie beyond the great sands? But, lost in the fascination of their dream, the Italians forgot one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back of a camel. No longer may Tr

n, caused the political downfall of Crispi, the greatest Italian of his time, his dream of Italian colonial expansion, like John Brown's soul, went marching on. With the vision of a prophet that great statesman saw that the day was not far distant when the steady increase in I

ot the Tripolitanian littoral, while cowled and sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian [Pg 93] orders have carried the gospel, and the propaganda of Italian annexation, to the oppressed and poverty-stricken peasantry of the far interior. Under the guise of scientists, Italian political and commercial agents have been quietly investigating the problems

o predominating interests in that region. On the pretext that the Turkish authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, Italy demanded and obtained permission to establish her own post-offices at the principal ports, so that for many years past the anomalous spectacle has been presented, just as in other portio

ives and interests seriously endangered sound somewhat hollow. To tell the truth, Italians have had a freer rein in the regency-and, incidentally, have caused mo

-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while the desperate resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribesmen has compelled her practically to evacuate Somaliland; overthrown ministries, depleted war-chests, and thousands of unmarked graves in the hinterland bear witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the cause of civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; Russia spent a quarter of a century and the lives of ten thousand soldiers in forci

n of the Turks and the substitution of an Italian régime, they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm reception-with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as

ircassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews-and in that capacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, [Pg 97] Italy automatically made war on the chief

, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the pressure. Hence t

sert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly sun, scanty food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is with the forest in which he works, ablaze with a religion which assures them that the one sure way to paradise is to die in battle with the unbelievers, can harass the Italian army of occupation for years to come by a guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to surrender Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from

definitely known as to its designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is a secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago by an Algerian dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es Senussi, from whom it takes its name; its object is the restoration of the Mohammedan religion to its original purity, austerity, and political power, the first step toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from Moslem lands; its initiated members, scattered throughout the M

, or monasteries, scattered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the

own as wekils, whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. On Grand Bairam-the Mohammedan Easter-the mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political condition of the order is discussed and its co

must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi [Pg 101] has established depots of stores and war material and factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling, of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the obscure harbours of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms and ammunition; thithe

s past. Strange as it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction [Pg 102] they return to Jof, or other centres of Senussiyeh activity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in their turn. The Senussiyeh's military affairs are equally well organised, the Arabs, than whom there is admittedly no finer fighting material in the world, being instructed along European lines, modified for desert warfare, by veter

orce to his standard by the extinction of all religious authority [Pg 103] in Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of Turkey is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem religion, and is venerated as such wherever praying-rugs are spread, the chief of this militant order is undoubtedly regarded by the average Mohammedan as the most actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam. The first Senu

en transporting to Jof from obscure ports on the Tripolitanian coast. It has been the policy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish administration in Tripolitania, to close the regions under its control to Christians, so it is scarcely likely that it would do other than resist an Italian penetration of the country, even in the face of a Turkish [Pg 104] evacuation. Though the order encouraged resistance to the French advance in the Sudan, consider

oubtedly far superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hard

mote regions which he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands full with the development of the coastal regions for many years to come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the interior of the country s

uous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as accessible from the mother country

en their new possession t

r her carabinieri, choosing them with a view to their intelligence, industry, energy, and sobriety, for to flood Tripoli

f the soil, and of obtaining their co-operation in the development of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the negro, cannot be bullied and domineered w

ending, to my way of thinking, upon frugal, hard-working peasant farmers, owning their

me and left to "the man on the spot," for history is filled with the chronicles of promising

habitants, native as well as foreign, and that it will promote the opening [Pg 107] up of the dark places to civilisation, if not to Christianity-for the Moslem does not change his faith. When, therefore, a