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Life in Morocco and Glimpses Beyond by Budgett Meakin
page 22 of 396 (05%)
terms of peace on the basis of tribute. Cooperation between the Powers
was not then thought of, and one by one they struck their bargains as
they are doing again to-day.

Yet even at the most violent period of Moorish misrule it is a
remarkable fact that Europeans were allowed to settle and trade in the
Empire, in all probability as little molested there as they would
have been had they remained at home, by varying religious tests and
changing governments. It is almost impossible to conceive, without
a perusal of the literature of the period, the incongruity of the
position. Foreign slaves would be employed in gangs outside the
dwellings of free fellow-countrymen with whom they were forbidden to
communicate, while every returning pirate captain added to the number
of the captives, sometimes bringing friends and relatives of those
who lived in freedom as the Sultan's "guests," though he considered
himself "at war" with their Governments. So little did the Moors
understand the position of things abroad, that at one time they made
war upon Gibraltar, while expressing the warmest friendship for
England, who then possessed it. This was done by Mulai Abd Allah V.,
in 1756, because, he said, the Governor had helped his rebel uncle at
Arzîla, so that the English, his so-called friends, did more harm than
his enemies--the Portuguese and Spaniards. "My father and I believe,"
wrote his son, Sidi Mohammed, to Admiral Pawkers, "that the king your
master has no knowledge of the behaviour towards us of the Governor of
Gibraltar, ... so Gibraltar shall be excluded from the peace to which
I am willing to consent between England and us, and with the aid of
the Almighty God, I will know how to avenge myself as I may on the
English of Gibraltar."

Previously Spain and Portugal had held the principal Moroccan
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