to the official of the Sultan, but to the representative of the Order. The policy of the Senussi has been described as anti-European. It is so in the sense that they have done their best to get out of the European's way, and that they have preached to their adopts a voluntary exile from territory ruled by the European. But in no other. They had never pursued an aggressive policy. When the Mahdi raised the Eastern Sudan against us and invited el Majahiri to join him, the latter refused. Senussiism has been primarily an intellectual, moral and spiritual force which has spread through its numerous schools, and by the spiritual purity of its teachers, a religious, not a political movement, aiming at the centralisation of the orthodox Islamic sects in a theocracy free from secular interference. It has covered the province with monastical centres of learning and made waste places fruitful. In recent years, Mr. Hogarth, who has studied its work in Cyrenaica generally, and Mr. Vischer, in his famous journey across the desert from Tripoli to Nigeria, have testified hi its favour. The latter says:
I have seen the hungry fed and the stranger entertained, and have myself enjoyed the hospitality and assistance enjoined by the laws of the Koran. My own experiences among the Senussi lead me to respect them as men, and to like them as true friends, whose good faith helped me more than anything else to accomplish my journey. …"
These particulars were necessary to make it clear that in invading Tripoli, Italy was not only wresting from Turkey the last of her African Dependencies: she was committing an unprovoked attack upon native peoples and was additionally assaulting Islam in Africa. This serves to explain at once the fierce and prolonged resistance which Italy experienced from communities who had no particular love for the Turk; the appeals to a "Holy War," issued by certain Italian bishops, whose utterances the Vatican felt called upon to repudiate, and the anger aroused among Mohammedans all over the world, notably in India, against "this war of aggression unparalleled in the history of modern times " to quote the manifesto of the London All-India Moslem League.
The predatory imperialism of modern Europe has never been revealed with such revolting cynicism as when Italy, profiting by the acute tension between France and Germany over Morocco in the autumn of 1911, issued.
