The Arabs have given the Berbers a name of their own—Shillah, which means "Outcast," referring back to the days when they drove them out of the plains up into the mountains; and it has stuck to them ever since.
Travellers descant upon the noble Shillah race. The dialect which they speak is called Shillah: the Riffis at Tetuan spoke Shillah among themselves, but soon picked up Arabic of a sort, and a little Spanish.
The Arab differs in every respect from the Berber. One of the finest types among mankind, he has a tall, spare frame, aquiline nose, fine eyes. He is kind, hospitable, dignified, abstemious, a poet, a gentleman, and a horseman. He is capable of great things, and of all Orientals has most impressed himself upon the world. At the same time he is too often treacherous and blood-thirsty, inclined to be sensual and inquisitive.
Perhaps his faults have led to the extolling of the noble Shillah race at the Arab's expense. On this subject Mr. Cunninghame Graham writes, that certain travellers in Morocco must have "been humiliated at finding in the Arabs a finer type than their own, and have turned to the Shillah race with the relief that the earthen teapot must find when taken away from the drawing-room companionship of Dresden china and put back again on the kitchen dresser." For myself "earthen teapot" and "Dresden china" have both much fascination. I would trust either just as far as I could see him.
Thus Morocco is populated by two antipathetic races, who neither singly nor jointly have or can consolidate it into a thriving empire. The Arab cared only to convert a conquered people to Mohammedanism and to push his individual fortune, heedless of assimilating individuals into one nation, as did the Romans. Great Arab chiefs there have been, but never a patriot. With the fatalistic spirit of the East, and a tendency to see life only from the personal standpoint, it followed that, when a holy war no longer fired the wandering and independent shepherds to fight and forced them to obey, they became "slack," remained stationary, or retrograded.
The Arab would not advance civilization in Morocco, nor would the wild and lawless Berber; the Moorish refugees from Spain had sadly degenerated; to crown all, civil war led to the destruction of the libraries and universities in Fez and Morocco City, and education was no more.
Ignorance begat worse government; decline and poverty followed one after the other. Corruption among the rulers spread downwards and ran through the country, until the whole body politic was unsound, and is so to-day.
Though the name of the Sultan, as Head of the Church, is held in reverence, yet many of the tribes would resist to the uttermost any attempt on his part to subdue them by force of arms, so unsettled is his empire.
He holds himself to be far superior to the Sultan of Turkey, who is not descended from the Prophet, but who, on the other hand, is the guardian of the sacred city of Mecca, and who possesses superior forces.
Second in rank to the Sultan of Morocco follow his ministers—the Chief Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Chief Adviser, the Minister of the Interior, and the Minister of Finance. Their duties are to carry out the Sultan's wishes, and, receiving no pay, they look to enriching themselves at the expense of their respective billets.