268 ACHIEVEMENTS OF MAHOMET. 



whatever may have been his private defects, when we 

 regard him as a ruler and lawgiver, we can only wonder 

 and admire. He established for the first time in his- 

 tory a United Arabia. In the moral life of his 

 countrymen he effected a remarkable reform. He 

 abolished drunkenness and gambling, vices to which 

 the Arabs had been specially addicted. He abolished 

 the practice of infanticide, and also succeeded in ren- 

 dering its memory detestable. It is said that Oumar, 

 the fierce apostle of Islam, shed but one tear in his 

 life, and that was when he remembered how, in the 

 Days of Darkness, his child had beat the dust off his 

 beard with her little hand as he was laying her in the 

 grave. Polygamy and slavery he did not prohibit ; 

 but whatever laws he made respecting women and 

 slaves were made with the view of improving their 

 condition. He removed that facility of divorce by 

 means of which an Arab could at any time repudiate 

 his wife : he enacted that no Moslem should be made 

 a slave, that the children of a slave girl by her master 

 should be free. Instead of repining that Mahomet 

 did no more, we have reason to be astonished that he 

 did so much. His career is the best example that can 

 be given of the influence of the Individual in human 

 history. That single man created the glory of his 

 nation and spread his language over half the earth. 

 The words which he preached to jeering crowds twelve 

 hundred years ago are now being studied by scholars 

 or by devotees in London and Paris and Berlin ; in 

 Mecca, where he laboured, in Medina, where he died ; 

 in Constantinople, in Cairo, in Fez, in Timbuctoo, in 

 Jerusalem, in Damascus, in Bassora, in Bagdhad, in 

 Bokhara, in Cabul, in Calcutta, in Pekin ; in the 

 steppes of Central Asia, in the islands of the Indian 



