Note 317 — Chapter I

Burkhardt characterizes the traditional institutions of the Desert as “so well adopted, so natural, and so simple, that every nation not reduced to slavery, if thrown at large on the wide desert, might be expected to adopt the same.”—Notes on the Bedouins, p. 214.

Burkhardt has here so forgotten the European, as to identify freedom and sense. Knowledge is to God, what science is to language, or mud to water. The fountain in each is pure, each step in “advance,” brings corruption: the last point, unless where there is a return upon itself, is always the worst.