Perhaps no people have preserved their character, customs, morals, and speech as unchanged through centuries as the Arabs, and have done so in spite of the most manifold changes in the world at large.  They were nomads, shepherds and hunters roving over little-known deserts, while Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Persia, Rome and Byzantium rose and fell.  And then, inspired by one idea, these same nomads suddenly rose in their turn and for a long time became the masters of the most beautiful valley of the old world, and were the bearers of the then civilization and science.  One hundred years after the death of the Prophet, his first followers, the Sarazenes, ruled from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, and from the Indies to the Atlantic Ocean.  But Christianity and its higher spiritual and material perfection, yes even its intolerance, which its high morality should have made impossible, drove the Arabs back again from Europe.  The rude force of the Turks undermined their rule in the Orient, and for the second time the children of Ishmael saw themselves driven out into the desert.

Those Arabs who had reached a higher state of culture, and had settled down to the pursuit of agriculture, commerce, or industry, had to sink the lower before the oppression of a rule of iron.  The artificial dealings of a government trying to imitate European methods, and the assistance of the Franks, the introduction of the census and of taxes, of duties and monopolies, standing armies and conscriptions, the barter of offices and the leasing of custom houses, slavery and the vices of the east, together with the energy, indomitable will and marvelous luck of Mehmet Ali, all combined in one grand achievement—­I mean the monumental tyranny, never yet equalled, under which the fellahs today are groaning in Egypt and the Arabs in Syria, and under which a whole country has been transformed into a private domain, and a whole people into personal slaves.

By far the greater part of the Arabic nation, however, had remained true to its old customs, and no despotism could get hold of them.  The extent of the Asiatic and African deserts, their fiery sky and parched soil, and the poverty of the inhabitants have ever been the protection of the Arabs.  The rule of the Persians, the Romans, and the Greeks was never more than partial, and often existed only in name.  The Bedouin today, like his fathers of old, is still living the life of want, care, and independence, roving through the same steppes as they, and watering his herds from the same wells as they did in the time of Moses or of Mahomet.

The oldest descriptions of the Arabs fit the Bedouins of our day.  Unquenchable feuds are still dividing the several tribes, the possession of a pasturing place or of a well still determines the welfare of many families, and blood-feuds and hospitality still are the vices and virtues of this people of nature.  Wherever along their frontiers the Arabs come in contact with foreign nations war is the result.  The children of Abraham divided among themselves the rich and fertile countries, while Ishmael and his tribe were cast out into the desert.  Shut off from all the other people the Arabs consider foreigners and foes to be identical and, unable to procure for themselves the products of industry, they believe they are justified in appropriating them wherever they find them.