GOVERNMENT OF ARABIA. 167 



over their families, and which viewed the , duty of 

 obedience as founded less on any legal obligations 

 than upon the opinion of benevolence in the ruler. 

 The office of their sheiks and elders, the maxims 

 which they observe in war and in negotiating peace, 

 must have arisen from the common wants and the 

 common consent of the tribes. They are so simple 

 — so well adapted to the spirit of their free and 

 wandering hfe — that every nation not yet reduced 

 to slavery, if thrown at large upon this wide desert, 

 might be expected to observe the same laws and 

 usages. The case, however, is very different with 

 their civil institutions ; and it is not easy to imagine 

 how so ma"""" arbitrary regulations in their social 

 economy — so inany nice distinctions in estimating 

 the price of wounds and insults — could have sprung 

 up by chance, or originated in the gradual improve- 

 ment of a wild and warlike multitude. Their politi- 

 cal code differs from that most generally prevalent 

 throughout the rest of the Moslem world, and must 

 have been the work of a legislator older than thft 

 revolution achieved by Mohammed. The Prophet 

 Obliged the Bedouin Arabs to renounce their idola 

 try, and to acknowledge the unity of a Divine Crea ■ 

 tor ; but he seems to have been less successful iit 

 forcing his laws upon his own nation than in estab 

 lishing them with their assistance in the surrounding 

 countries. 



