are at war with the Ka'ab-and Bandar Rig was a few days ago accidentally consumed by fire." In addition, Shaikh Nasir of Bushire was at war with Shaikh Rashid. Amid this pandemonium the English went steadily on, minding their own business now. The Portuguese had gone; the Dutch had gone; the Persian fleet had gone. By a process of elimination the English alone remained. But the disturbed and exhausted condition of Persia did not make for good business. Trade in the Gulf, as an official report written in 1790 declares, was languishing. And it is not surprising to learn that in one year the accounts of the Bushire Residency (which was now the company's head-quarters in the Gulf) showed a loss of nearly Rs. 10,000. That was in 1779, when Bushire was sacked by Baqir Khan of Tangsir. The town, with its 10,000 inhabitants, was set on fire, relates Beaumont, the Resident, and looted by a handful of men, while Shaikh Sadun, the brother of Shaikh Nasir (who was, unfortunately, away at the time), "kept close in his house, not daring to stir out, though supported by near 200 armed men with musquets, when 50 brave fellows led by a man of courage might have recovered the place." To Beaumont this was merely what he describes as a "disagreeable situation." Mr. Nicholas Smith, who had to go through a similar experience twenty years later, when a revolution against Shaikh Nasir broke out in this most unquiet town, was not so philosophical. "Seeing no prospect of tranquility here for some time to come determined me," he writes, " to retire with the honourable company's and my private property to Kharag till Bushire became permanently settled, or that I could be assured of such support from your honourable board as my incoherent situation requires." Unfortunately for Mr. Smith, a fleet of the piratical Beni Uttobee Arabs was then blockading Kharag, so he had to see things through in Bushire, “sustaining a siege of five days, and being obliged to drink water little better than the sea." Scarcely a house escaped being stripped (he continues), and it was with the greatest difficulty with the Residency sepoys and my own. threats that I frustrated the several attempts made on this old ruin. All the factory servants had retired to their own houses and were plundered of even the shirt on their backs. As they have nobody else to look up to in their misfortunes, I have supplied them with clothes, and hope your Honourable Board will reimburse me this expense and VOL. 246. NO. 502. O the loss of great part of my own clothes which were in the hands of the washerman. . . . Your Honourable Board will, I hope, consider that I undergo enough in other respects in these disturbances without allowing me to suffer the loss of my private property and hard-earned subsistence. And though I have never received, solicited or expect your favour, you will surely not refuse the grant which justice demands. Somewhat acid, that last sentence. But Mr. Smith was doubtless feeling bitter at the time, for he had lost not only his linen but his job-being under orders to hand over charge of the residency to Mirza Mehdi Ali Khan, who had been sent from Bombay with very particular instructions on commercial and political matters. The painful truth is, as we gather from the company's correspondence, that Mr. Smith had used very much the mot juste in describing his situation as "incoherent "-and had not altogether observed, as he should have done, the company's orders to its servants to "live soberly and frugally." But Nicholas went down fighting. He would leave Bushire if he had to; but hand over the British flag to the Mirza-never. In a long and eloquent letter, breathing patriotism and port, he justifies his action to the governor and council, who replied that they could "scarcely reconcile it with a perfect state of sanity!" We cannot quote all of the eight perfectly good reasons he brings forward, but here are some :— Because I conceive it repugnant to the honour of the British nation, consequently infamy in me and disgraceful to the name of the Englishmen to deliver the British flag to the will of a Musulman subject. Because I have thoroughly ascertained that the British flag will never again receive that respect which every Englishman is justly tenacious of, when the inhabitants observe with surprise what they suppose impossible that the British flag should be so unprecedentedly and strangely appropriated. Because (8thly and lastly) for many reasons which my local knowledge and six years' experience affords me of the inhabitants here, of their prejudices, customs, manners and religion I can never be accessory to a proceeding which my national pride revolts at and carries me so far to declare I would rather suffer any private injury than be the willful Agent of Public Dishonour to my King, Country and Honourable employers. More incoherent than ever-but, what a lad! The company had other things to think of, however, than refractory agents. A cloud was on the horizon which gave them anxious thought-the French menace, in Europe and Asia. There was another cloud which threatened soon to darken the whole sky. Although the Persian Gulf is now in a tolerably settled and peaceable state "—says the commercial report, already quoted -" and the British flag is there treated with great respect, a weak, unarmed British vessel ought not to be suffered to take a voyage from any of the ports in India to Basra . . . some danger is justly to be apprehended from pirates." That was written in 1789. Ten years later piratical attacks on British merchantmen, and on men-of-war as well, had become so common that it was no longer a question of some danger, but of very great danger to navigation and the freedom of the seas. Not for nothing do our maps still give that barren strip of the south-west littoral of the gulf, between Cape Musandam and Dubai, the ominous name of "the Pirate Coast." God preserve us from the monsters," said his Arab friend to Sir John Malcolm on his first voyage up the Gulf in 1800: Their occupation is Piracy, and their delight Murder; and to make it worse they give you the most pious reasons for every villainy they commit. If you are a captive and offer all you possess to save your life they say "No; it is written in the Quran that it is unlawful to plunder the living, but we are not prohibited in that sacred work from stripping the dead." So saying, they knock you on the head. Of such was the infamous robber Rahmat bin Jaubir who, after a stormy career of blackmail and piracy, died, as we are told in an old paper, in this epic manner. "Nearly 70 years old, totally blind and covered with wounds," alone save for a few hired Baluchis (for his tribe had been nearly destroyed), he sailed to Bahrain to wage his last fight. Shaikh Ahmad bin Sulaiman (the narrative proceeds) engaged him in single combat. Rahmat, seeing that he was beaten, and must either surrender or be captured by boarding, gave orders for his vessel to grapple with the enemy, and took his youngest son, a fine boy about eight years old, in his arms; and, seizing a lighted match, directed his attendants to lead him down to the magazine. . . . In a few seconds the sea was covered with the scattered timbers of the exploded vessel, and the miserable remains of Rahmat and his devoted followers. The explosion set fire to the enemy's buggalow, which soon after blew up, but not before her commander and crew had been rescued. Thus ended Rahmat bin Jaubir, for so many years the scourge and terror of this part of the world, and whose death was felt as a blessing in every part of the Gulf. Here we must stop. It is by no means the end of the story; but Great Britain's record in the later years-the suppression of slavery and piracy, quarantine work, marine surveys, the lighting and buoying of these waters-is a more familiar one, which brings us, moreover, dangerously near modern days, the days of the fast mail, and posts, and telegraphs and landing grounds, wherein, some will say, there can be no romance anyhow. For "the fog of memory" lifts when you leave the past and come to the present; and you see things as they are without any glamour. But things as they are can sometimes serve to recall what is worth remembering. In Mr. Chesterton's play "Magic," that old-fashioned practitioner, Dr. Grimthorpe, warns the girl Patricia Carleon, dreaming of fairies, to remember "the difference between the things which are beautiful and the things which are there." "That red lamp over my door," he says, “is not beautiful; but it is there. You might even come to be glad that it is there." Even so the red lamp of the inner buoy at Bushire, winking away at sea every night, may or may not be beautiful. But we are glad that it is there. H. D. G. LAW 1. 2. THE CAUSES OF EUROPEAN POVERTY Final Report adopted by the World Economic Conference of Geneva, Statement by Members of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia 3. Europe in the Nineteenth Century. By A. J. GRANT and H. W. V. TEMPERLEY. Longmans. 1927. 4. The Social Evolution in Austria. By C. A. MACARTNEY. Cambridge University Press. 1927. 5. Recent Monopolistic Tendencies in Industry and Trade. By Professor GUSTAV CASSEL. Publications of the League of Nations. 1927. 6. A Plea for the Removal of the Restrictions upon European Trade. The Times. 1926. 7. The Continental System. By E. F. HECKSCHER. Oxford University Press. 1922. 8. The Division of the Product of Industry. By Professor A. L. BowLEY. Oxford University Press. 1919. 9. The Wealth of Nations. By ADAM SMITH. 1766. AL LL thoughtful observers have been disappointed at the slowness of the recovery of the European Continent and the British Isles since the Great War. Europe, which until 1914 was the home of the arts and the producer of the greater part of the material comforts of life, is now struggling to maintain itself amid unrest and poverty. Without emphasising this too much, and allowing for the substantial bases of wealth which still exist, nobody can help seeing that Europe is not progressing in the production of the things which make for the comfort and beauty of existence, as it did before the Great War. Although the average standard of material well-being is not excessively low, it is certainly not high. Wealth is not being produced as quickly as population. There is a surplus of hands which cannot be employed, of mouths which cannot be filled; that is to say, there is not enough wealth being produced to go round, although there are plenty of hands to produce it, and although the earth is as bountiful as ever, and much of it is lying idle. This is an irrational state of affairs which proves conclusively that the European peoples are not making anything like the full use of their means of subsistence and prosperity. |