72 THEODORE II. AND THE 



the village without an assassination : under the new reign, not a single 

 murder has transpired, either in the borough or its suburbs. One 

 must read travels taken in Abyssinia, from 1830 to 1845, in order to 

 appreciate the benefit of a security obtained in so short a time, and 

 the vigour of the hand which has brought it about. For my own 

 part, I remember being ten times benighted at a distance of from two 

 and a half to four miles from my residence, in company with a single 

 servant, unarmed like myself, and never has the idea entered my mind 

 that I could run the shadow of a danger. Certainly on Ethiopian 

 territory I had not been as tranquil. 



It was not the public roads alone that called for the establishment of 

 order ; society no less required it. An unbridled feudal system, in 

 spite of the laws, had nearly suppressed marriage ; it had become the 

 fashion to replace the religious ceremony by a civil bond, broken by 

 the first caprice. All the great barons had, around the legal sizoro, 

 the matron treated with dissembled respect, haughty, indolent, and 

 deserted, a staif of pert, pretty faced servants, dividing their not very 

 rigorous afi'ection between their all-powerful master and the dissipated 

 young fellows who encumbered the ante-rooms. It was a harem with- 

 out the name. Powerless to check such a course, the negus did at 

 least some good, first in setting an example, and afterwards by making 

 a decree obliging all officers and soldiers to have but one wife. 



The most dangerous work to attempt was religious reform. The 

 friends of absolute classification have not hesitated to declare the 

 Abyssinian Church heretical and Eutychian. The truth is that 

 Abyssinian Christianity is Catholicism, but a barbarous description 

 of it ; Eutychianism is but an opinion, by no means officially recog- 

 nized, and, like others, subject to dispute ; and Abyssinia is only 

 separated from the Romish Church by insignificant questions, which 

 Rome was the first to turn to account. The Abyssinians received 

 Christianity in the fourth century from the Church of Alexandria,, 

 with which they remained elosely connected. In order still more to 

 confirm this union, the ecclesiastical constitution, promulgated by the 

 famous Saint Thekla Uaimanot in the twelfth century, decreed that 

 the aboiina, or Abyssinian archbishop, should always be a foreigner, 

 a Copt, nominated by the patriarch of Alexandria. The same consti- 

 tution gave to the Church two-thirds of the crown lands, an enormous 

 and burdensome property, which was augmented by the numerous 

 gifts of the negus and of the more pious balagoult (nobles; feudal 



