annum. Indeed, it is no uncommon practice for goods bought on long
credit to be sold below cost price for this purpose. Against such
methods who can compete?

Yet this is a rich, undeveloped land--not exactly an El Dorado, though
certainly as full of promise as any so styled has proved to be when
reached--favoured physically and geographically, but politically
stagnant, cursed with an effete administration, fettered by a decrepit
creed. In view of this situation, it is no wonder that from time to
time specious schemes appear and disappear with clockwork regularity.
Now it is in England, now in France, that a gambling public is found
to hazard the cost of proving the impossibility of opening the country
with a rush, and the worthlessness of so-called concessions and
monopolies granted by sheïkhs in the south, who, however they may
chafe under existing rule which forbids them ports of their own,
possess none of the powers required to treat with foreigners.

As normal trade has waned in Morocco, busy minds have not been slow in
devising illicit, or at least unusual, methods of making money,
even, one regrets to say, of making false money. Among the drawbacks
suffered by the commerce which pines under the shade of the shareefian
umbrella, one--and that far from the least--is the unsatisfactory
coinage, which till a few years ago was almost entirely foreign. To
have to depend in so important a matter on any mint abroad is bad
enough, but for that mint to be Spanish means much. Centuries ago
the Moors coined more, but with the exception of a horrible token of
infinitesimal value called "floos," the products of their extinct
mints are only to be found in the hands of collectors, in buried
hoards, or among the jewellery displayed at home by Mooresses and
Jewesses, whose fortunes, so invested, may not be seized for debt.