It is, however, to Central Africa that Islam must in the future look for a centre of religious gravity westwards.  There, in the conversion of the negro race of the Tropics, already so rapidly proceeding, she has good prospect of compensation for all losses on the Mediterranean coast; and, screened by the Sahara and by a climate unsuited to European life, she may retain for centuries her political as well as her religious independence.  The negro races will not only be Mohammedanised; they will also be Arabised; and a community of language and of custom will thus preserve for Soudan its connection with Mecca, and so with the general life of Islam.  The losses, then, to Islam in Africa will be rather apparent than real, and may even in the end prove a source of new strength.

Nor must we lose sight of the possibility of a French defeat I believe that at no time during the past forty years has the military position of “our allies” been in a graver peril in their colony than now, or the resources of their antagonists greater.  It is a weakness of the French system in Africa that it has made no attempt to assimilate the native population; and it is the strength of that population, in as far as it is Arab, that it does assimilate French thought to its own advantage.  It is far from certain whether the conquest of Algiers may not some day have for its effect the renewal of Mohammedan political vitality in all the Barbary Coast.

A more absolute and immediate loss must be anticipated in Europe and Western Asia.  There it is pretty certain that in a very few years Ottoman rule will have ceased, and the Turkish-speaking lands composing the Empire been absorbed by one or other of the powerful neighbours who have so long coveted their possession.  Austria, in person or by deputy, may be expected by the end of the present century to have inherited the European, and Russia the Asiatic, provinces of Turkey proper, while the fate of Syria and Egypt will only have been averted, if averted it be, by the intervention of England.  That a dissolution of the Empire may and will be easily accomplished I have myself little doubt.  The military power of Constantinople, though still considerable for the purposes of internal control, will hardly again venture to cope single-handed with any European State, nor is it in the least probable that the Sultan will receive further Christian support from without.  The fall of Kars has laid Asia Minor open to the Russian arms, and the territorial cessions of San Stefano and Berlin have laid Roumelia open to the Austrian.  On the first occasion of a quarrel with the Porte a simultaneous advance from both quarters would preclude the chance of even a serious struggle, and the subjugation of the Turkish-speaking races would be effected without more difficulty.