Survivals and New Arrivals. It was published by Sheed and Ward, founded in 1926. I have a copy—somewhere—a paperback, with a paper wrapper, I think as advertisements; Belloc's book could not have been their first book. It seems likely to me that Sheed and Ward must have borrowed, and that contractual details somewhere prohibited them from any deep discussions on Jews.
Survivals and New Arrivals—which, by the way, uses the phrase 'The Two Cultures', though not very meaningfully—has but one mention of Jews: If you had hazarded such guesses, even as little as fifty years ago, as (i) that by 1929 the United States would be under prohibition [of alcohol] , (2) that women would be sitting in the English House of Commons, (3) that Russia would be organised as an experiment in Communism under a clique of Jews, the suggestions would have sounded mad.
Belloc's book is based on the belief that the Catholic Church has uniquely been attacked for 1,900 years 'from every conceivable point'. He counts some of these attacks as 'heresies'. Others aren't based on detailed beliefs—Belloc believed in such things as Jesus' blood really being present at Masses—but such things as scientific scepticism, and 'neo-Paganism'.
Belloc regards Islam as heretical, 'a direct derivative from the Catholic Church', but doesn't state how common this belief is or was. He may just mean that some of the ideas were in common, and the Jewish-origin hypothesis explains that, in fact far better. (My best guess is that both Christianity and Islam are rooted in Judaism). Belloc classifies it as a 'new arrival', which of course looks odd. He devotes about ten pages of his book to Islam.
An odd aspect of Belloc's view is its remoteness from such earthly things as money and weaponry and horses and hired thugs and spies. He says nothing about Mohammed's large-scale rapes, or about mass-murders in India by Islam. These things are almost entirely censored, very successfully (Arthur Kemp's books know nothing of northwest India, for example). Belloc's claim that Arabs in north Africa had been savagely taxed and were relieved when Roman exactions were removed—the Jewish hypothesis explains all this completely satisfactorily as a result of Jews switching from support of Rome to inventing and using Islam, including support in Spain by 'opening the gates' to Islamic savagery. And the Jewish hypothesis explains the switch to north-west Europe well: better trans-Atlantic communications, better timber ships, higher IQ people phrased in the language of the time.
Anyway, Chapter III The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed must be Belloc's main statement on Islam. Unfortunately, Belloc's style is at its worst. Perhaps he was space-filling; all his life he had to write for money. There are endless accounts, omitting the blood and logistics, of battles, each with a value-judgment attached: unexpected blow, overwhelming power, very high civilization, maintained its power, vigorously survived. Perhaps he was backing both sides, never being completely wrong. He seems to be impractical and never gives numerical or factual information. One has to wonder whether Belloc is worth reading when at his vaguest. Even such a thing as 'high civilization' is vague; does he just mean gold, silver, and gems?
Please note that the anti-Catholic writer, Joseph McCabe, admired Islam. His book The Splendour of Moorish Spain was published in 1935, by Watts & Co, who were Jewish promoters essentially. His book is a history from the degradation of Rome to modern Spain. Islamic times in Spain are highly praised, and such things as the Inquisition condemned; I think this book had some influence with pro-Jew factions, though less with English Protestants. McCabe was known perssonally to Belloc, who was aware of McCabe's dislike of Catholicism. At any rate, McCabe must have worried Belloc to some extent. Incidentally, McCabe was about as little inclined to attribute power to Jews as Belloc was. Bear in mind that McCabe's books were published with clear Jewish approval, and Belloc's books were at least tolerated by Jews.
I'll try to deal with his case, but bearing in mind the Jewish question too.
What follows is from Chapter III. The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed. From The Great Heresies. I've edited it down in the hope of clarifying, selecting from the long chapter what seem the most relevant parts, though of course you may have made different choices. The portion with yellow background colour is perhaps the most important. Belloc's attempt to build up from a philosophical basis, itself in my view full of errors, resists accurate description; and he avoids all mention of Jews as a belligerent power. Belloc's intention is to prove Islam might well become a resurgent menace. All my extracts are verbatim and in sequence, and in red; the few notes [in square brackets] are my attempts to explain details:
... before following that story we must grasp the two fundamental things—first, the nature of Mohammedanism; second, the essential cause of its sudden and, as it were, miraculous success over so many thousands of miles of territory and so many millions of human beings.
Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine.
... he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord ['Jesus'] was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether.
With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification.
Now, why did this new, simple, energetic heresy have its sudden overwhelming success?
One answer is that it won battles. It won them at once, as we shall see when we come to the history of the thing.
There was weariness and discontent with theological debate, which, for all its intensity, had grown out of touch with the masses. There lay upon the freemen, already tortured with debt, a heavy burden of imperial [presumably Roman Empire, part of which was Greek-speaking] taxation; and there was the irritant of existing central government interfering with men’s lives; there was the tyranny of the lawyers and their charges.
To all this Islam came as a vast relief and a solution of strain. The slave who admitted that Mohammed was the prophet of God and that the new teaching had, therefore, divine authority, ceased to be a slave. The slave who adopted Islam was henceforward free. The debtor who “accepted” was rid of his debts. Usury was forbidden.
That is the main fact which accounts for the sudden spread of Islam after its first armed victory over the armies rather than the people of the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire. But this alone would not account for two other equally striking triumphs. The first was the power the new heresy showed of absorbing the Asiatic people of the Near East, Mesopotamia and the mountain land between it and India. The second was the wealth and the splendour of the Caliphate (that is, of the central Mohammedan monarchy) in the generations coming immediately after the first sweep of victory.
Now when Islam came with its first furious victorious cavalry charges springing from the desert, it powerfully reinforced this tendency of Asia to reassert itself. The uniformity of temper which is the mark of Asiatic society, responded at once to this new idea of one very simple, personal form of government, sanctified by religion, and ruling with a power theoretically absolute from one centre. The Caliphate once established at Baghdad, Baghdad became just what Babylon had been; the central capital of one vast society...
But even more remarkable than the flooding of all near Asia with Mohammedanism in one lifetime was the wealth and splendour and culture of the new Islamic Empire. Islam was in those early centuries (most of the seventh, all the eighth and ninth), the highest material civilization of our occidental world.
One might sum up and say that the contrast between the Mohammedan world of those early centuries and the Christian world which it threatened to overwhelm was like the contrast between a modern industrialized state and a backward, half-developed state next door to it:
Yet when the second dynasty which presided for so long over Islam, the Abbasides, with their capital further east at Baghdad, on the Euphrates, restored the old Mesopotamian domination over Syria, ruling also Egypt and all the Mohammedan world, that splendour and science, material power and wealth of which I spoke, arose and dazzled all contemporaries, and we must ask the question again: why was this?
The answer lies in the very nature of the Mohammedan conquest. It did not, as has been so frequently repeated, destroy at once what it came across; it did not exterminate all those who would not accept Islam. But the conquerors, and those whom they converted and attached to themselves from the native populations, were still too few to govern by force. And (what is more important) they had no idea of organization. They were always slipshod and haphazard. Therefore a very large majority of the conquered remained in their old habits of life and of religion.
What ever was not Mohammedan in the immense Mohammedan Empire—that is, much the most of its population—was subject to a special tribute; and it was this tribute which furnished directly, without loss from the intricacies of bureaucracy, the wealth of the central power: the revenue of the Caliph.
First they rise with great violence and become fashionable; they do so by insisting on some one of the great Catholic doctrines in an exaggerated fashion; and because the great Catholic doctrines combined form the only full and satisfactory philosophy known to mankind, each doctrine is bound to have its special appeal. [Material on Arianism and Calvinism, omitted. Note though that 'predestination' sounds very like the 'Chosen People' idea]
After this first phase of the great heresies, when they are in their initial vigour and spread like a flame from man to man, there comes a second phase of decline, lasting, apparently (according to some obscure law), through about five or six generations: say a couple of hundred years or a little more.
Then comes the third phase, when each heresy wholly disappears as a bit of doctrine: no one believes the doctrine any more or only such a tiny fraction remain believers that they no longer count. But the social and moral factors of the heresy remain and may be of powerful effect for generations more.
Now in the case of Islam none of all this happened except the first phase.
And there is another point in connection with this power of Islam. Islam is apparently unconvertible.
The missionary efforts made by great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed.
Now what is the explanation of all this? Why should Islam alone of all the great heresies show such continued vitality?
These men ['highly educated European gentlemen' who converted to Islam] always give the same answer—Islam is indestructible because it is founded on simplicity and justice. It has kept those Christian doctrines which are evidently true and which appeal to the common sense of millions, while getting rid of priestcraft, mysteries, sacraments, and all the rest of it. It proclaims and practices human equality. It loves justice and forbids usury. It produces a society in which men are happier and feel their own dignity more than in any other. That is its strength and that is why it still converts people and endures and will perhaps return to power in the near future.
Now I do not think that explanation to be the true one. All heresy talks in those terms. Every heresy will tell you that it has purified the corruptions of Christian doctrines and in general done nothing but good to mankind, satisfied the human soul, and so on. Yet every one of them except Mohammedanism has faded out. Why?
Islam has differed from all the other heresies in two main points which must be carefully noticed:
(1) It did not rise within the Church, that is, within the frontiers of our civilization. Its heresiarch was not a man originally Catholic who led away Catholic followers by his novel doctrine as did Arius or Calvin. He was an outsider born a pagan, living among pagans, and never baptized.
(2) This body of Islam attacking Christendom from beyond its frontiers and not breaking it up from within, happened to be continually recruited with fighting material of the strongest kind and drafted in from the pagan outer darkness.
Not long after the first conquest of Syria and Egypt it looked as though the enthusiastic new heresy, in spite of its dazzling sudden triumph, would fail. The continuity in leadership broke down. So did the political unity of the whole scheme. The original capital of the movement was Damascus and at first Mohammedanism was a Syrian thing (and, by extension, an Egyptian thing); but after quite a short time a break-up was apparent. A new dynasty began ruling from Mesopotamia and no longer from Syria. The Western Districts, that is North Africa and Spain (after the conquest of Spain), formed a separate political government under a separate obedience. But the caliphs at Baghdad began to support themselves by a bodyguard of hired fighters who were Mongols from the steppes of Asia.
Twice we in the Christian European West have barely escaped final destruction at their hands; once when we defeated the vast Asiatic army of Attila near Chalons in France, in the middle of the fifth century (not before he had committed horrible outrage and left ruin behind him everywhere), and again in the thirteenth century, 800 years later. Then the advancing Asiatic Mongol power was checked, not by our armies but by the death of the man who had united it in his one hand. But it was not checked till it reached north Italy and was approaching Venice.
It was this recruitment of Mongol bodyguards in successive installments which kept Islam going and prevented its suffering the fate that all other heresies had suffered. It kept Islam thundering like a battering ram from outside the frontiers of Europe, making breaches in our defence and penetrating further and further into what had been Christian lands.
The Mongol invaders readily accepted Islam; the men who served as mercenary soldiers and formed the real power of the Caliphs were quite ready to conform to the simple requirements of Mohammedanism. They had no regular religion of their own strong enough to counteract the effects of those doctrines of Islam which, mutilated as they were, were in the main Christian doctrines—the unity and majesty of God, the immortality of the soul and all the rest of it. The Mongol mercenaries supporting the political power of the Caliphs were attracted to these main doctrines and easily adopted them. They became good Moslems and as soldiers supporting the Caliphs were thus propagators and maintainers of Islam.
When in the heart of the Middle Ages it looked as though again Islam had failed, a new batch of Mongol soldiers, “Turks” by name, came in and saved the fortunes of Mohammedanism again although they began by the most abominable destruction of such civilization as Mohammedanism had preserved. That is why in the struggles of the Crusades Christians regarded the enemy as “The Turk”; a general name common to many of these nomad tribes. The Christian preachers of the Crusades and captains of the soldiers and the Crusaders in their songs speak of “The Turk” as the enemy much more than they do in general of Mohammedanism.
In spite of the advantage of being fed by continual recruitment, the pressure of Mohammedanism upon Christendom might have failed after all, had one supreme attempt to relieve that pressure upon the Christian West succeeded. That supreme attempt was made in the middle of the whole business (A.D. 1095-1200) and is called in history “The Crusades.” Catholic Christendom succeeded in recapturing Spain; it nearly succeeded in pushing back Mohammedanism from Syria, in saving the Christian civilization of Asia, and in cutting off the Asiatic Mohammedan from the African. Had it done so perhaps Mohammedanism would have died.
But the Crusades failed. Their failure is the major tragedy in the history of our struggle against Islam, that is, against Asia—against the East.
What the Crusades were, and why and how they failed I shall now describe. [I'm very tempted to delete Belloc's long, long account, which ended in failure. But it meant a lot to Belloc.]
But while Mohammedanism was spreading, absorbing greater and greater numbers into its own body; out of the subject Christian populations of East and North Africa, occupying more and more territory, a defensive reaction against it had begun. Islam gradually absorbed North Africa and crossed over into Spain; less than a century after those first victories in Syria it even pushed across the Pyrenees, right into France. Luckily it was defeated in battle halfway between Tours and Poitiers in the north centre of the country.
We of the West had been besieged in three ways; pagan Asiatics had come upon us in the very heart of the Germanies; pagan pirates of the most cruel and disgusting sort had swarmed over the Northern Seas and nearly wiped out Christian civilization in England and hurt it also in Northern France; and with all that there had been this pressure of Mohammedanism coming from the South and South-east—a much more civilized pressure than that of the Asiatics or Scandinavian pirates but still a menace, under which our Christian civilization came near to disappearing.
Then came the great reaction and the awakening of Europe. [Belloc calls it 'a great reaction', but he states that it failed!]
The chivalry which poured out of Gaul into Spain and the native Spanish knights forcing back the Mohammedans began the affair. The Scandinavian pirates and the raiders from Asia had been defeated two generations before. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, distant, expensive and perilous, but continuous throughout the Dark Ages, were now especially imperilled through a new Mongol wave of Mohammedan soldiers establishing themselves over the East and especially in Palestine; and the cry arose that the Holy Places, the True Cross (which was preserved in Jerusalem) and the remaining Christian communities of Syria and Palestine, and above all the Holy Sepulchre—the site of the Resurrection, the main object of every pilgrimage—ought to be saved from the usurping hands of Islam. Enthusiastic men preached the duty of marching eastward and rescuing the Holy Land; the reigning Pope, Urban, put himself at the head of the movement in a famous sermon delivered in France to vast crowds, who cried out: “God wills it.”
The First Crusade was launched in three great bodies of more or less organized Christian soldiery, who set out to march from Western Europe to the Holy Land. ... In order not to exhaust the provisions of the countries through which they had to march the Christian leaders went in three bodies, one from Northern France, going down the valley of the Danube; another from Southern France, going across Italy; and a third of Frenchmen who had recently acquired dominion in Southern Italy and who crossed the Adriatic directly, making for Constantinople through the Balkans. They all joined at Constantinople ...
The Emperor at Constantinople was still free, at the head of his great Christian capital, but he was dangerously menaced by the fighting Mohammedan Turks who were only just over the water in Asia Minor ... another Crusading leader made himself feudal lord... ... they ... stormed the city ... a string of towns ... These “ports of the desert” have always been rendered very important by commerce ... towns thus stretched along the edge of the desert begins from Aleppo in the north down as far as Petra, south of the Dead Sea. They were united by the great caravan route which reaches to North Arabia ... The Kings of France and England set out with great armies to re-establish the Crusading position, and this time they went for the strategic key of the whole country—Damascus. But they failed to take it ... Salah-ed-Din—whom we call Saladin—... acquired all power over the Mohammedan world of the Near East. ... The Christian Army was approaching Tiberias and had got as far as the sloping mountain-side of Hattin, about a day’s march away, when it was attacked by Saladin and destroyed... in the summer of 1187, was followed by the collapse of nearly the whole Christian military colony in Syria and the Holy Land. Saladin took town after town, save one or two points on the sea coast which were to remain in Christian hands more than another lifetime. But the kingdom of Jerusalem, the feudal Christian realm which had recovered and held the Holy Places, was gone. ... All the great leaders, the King of England, Richard Plantagenet, the King of France and the Emperor, commanding jointly a large and first-rate army mainly German in recruitment, set out to recover what had been lost. But they failed. ...
Thus ended a series of three mighty duels between Christendom and Islam. Islam had won.
[Now for 'what might have been'] Had the Crusaders’ remaining force at the end of the first Crusading march been a little more numerous, had they taken Damascus and the string of towns on the fringe of the desert, the whole history of the world would have been changed. ... As it was Mohammedanism not only survived but grew stronger. It was indeed slowly thrust out of Spain and the eastern islands of the Mediterranean, but it maintained its hold on the whole of North Africa, Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, and thence it went forward and conquered the Balkans and Greece, overran Hungary and twice threatened to overrun Germany and reach France again from the East, putting an end to our civilization. One of the reasons that the breakdown of Christendom at the Reformation took place was the fact that Mohammedan pressure against the German Emperor gave the German Princes and towns the opportunity to rebel and start Protestant Churches in their dominions. [If Belloc is correct, and Islamic shipping was powerful in the eastern Mediterranean but kept out of the west, this must have affected shipowners, presumably in favour of Western European ships, and perhaps explaining the shift by Jews to northwest Europe, the City of London, and the future British (or 'British') Empire.]
Many expeditions followed against the Turk in one form or another; they were called Crusades, and the idea continued until the very end of the Middle Ages. But there was no recovery of Syria and no thrusting back of the Moslem.
Meanwhile the first Crusading march had brought so many new experiences to Western Europe that culture had developed very rapidly and produced the magnificent architecture and the high philosophy and social structure of the Middle Ages. The last subject of all in this connection, the one which I will treat next, is the very important and almost neglected question of whether Mohammedan power may not re-arise in the modern world.
While this beating back of the Mohammedan into Africa was going on to the Western side of Europe, exactly the opposite was happening on the eastern side. After the Crusades had failed Mohammedans made themselves secure in Asia Minor and began that long hammering at Constantinople which finally succeeded.
The fall of Constantinople at the end of the Middle Ages (1453) was only the beginning of further Mohammedan advances. Islam swept all over the Balkans; it took all the Eastern Mediterranean islands, Crete and Rhodes and the rest; it completely occupied Greece; it began pushing up the Danube valley and northwards into the great plains; it destroyed the ancient kingdom of Hungary in the fatal battle of Mohacs and at last, in the first third of the sixteenth century, just at the moment when the storm of the Reformation had broken out Islam threatened Europe close at hand, bringing pressure upon the heart of the Empire, at Vienna.
It is not generally appreciated how the success of Luther’s religious revolution against Catholicism in Germany was due to the way in which Mohammedan pressure from the East was paralysing the central authority of the German Emperors. They had to compromise with the leaders of the religious revolution and try to patch up a sort of awkward peace between the irreconcilable claims of Catholic authority and Protestant religious theory in order to meet the enemy at their gates; the enemy which had already overthrown Hungary and might well overthrow all of Southern Germany and perhaps reach the Rhine. If Islam had succeeded in doing this during the chaos of violent civil dissension among the Germans, due to the launching of the Reformation, our civilization would have been as effectively destroyed as it would have been if the first rush of the Mohammedans through Spain had not been checked and beaten back eight centuries earlier in the middle of France. A huge Mohammedan armada fought at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth against the Christian fleet at Lepanto. The Christians won that naval action and the Western Mediterranean was saved. But it was a very close thing, and the name of Lepanto should remain in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half dozen great names in the history of the Christian world. It has been a worthy theme for the finest battle poem of our time, “The Ballad of Lepanto,” by the late Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.
Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least. We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohammedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohammedan Government centred at Constantinople had better artillery and better army equipment of every kind than had we Christians in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683. But the peril remained, Islam was still immensely powerful within a few marches of Austria and it was not until the great victory of Prince Eugene at Zenta in 1697 and the capture of Belgrade that the tide really turned—and by that time we were at the end of the seventeenth century.
When that vast revolution in human affairs introduced by the invention of modern machinery began in England and spread slowly throughout Europe, the Mohammedan world proved itself quite incapable of taking advantage thereof. During the Napoleonic wars, although supported by England, Islam failed entirely to meet the French armies of Egypt; its last effort resulted in complete defeat (the land battle of the Nile).
All during the nineteenth century the process continued. As a result, Mohammedan North Africa was gradually subjected to European control; the last independent piece to go being Morocco. Egypt fell under the control of England. Long before that Greece had been liberated, and the Balkan States. Half a lifetime ago it was taken for granted everywhere that the last remnants of Mohammedan power in Europe would disappear. England bolstered it up and did save Constantinople from being taken by the Russians in 1877-78, but it seemed only a question of a few years before the Turks would be wiped out for good. Everyone was waiting for the end of Islam, on this side of the Bosphorus at least; while in Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia it was losing all political and military vigour. After the Great War, what was left of Mohammedan power, even in hither Asia, was only saved by the violent quarrels between the Allies.
To what was due this collapse? I have never seen an answer to that question. There was no moral disintegration from within, there was no intellectual breakdown; you will find the Egyptian or Syrian student today, if you talk to him on any philosophical or scientific subject which he has studied, to be the equal of any European. If Islam has no physical science now applied to any of its problems, in arms and communications, it has apparently ceased to be part of our world and fallen definitely below it. Of every dozen Mohammedans in the world today, eleven are actually or virtually subjects of an Occidental power. It would seem, I repeat, as though the great duel was now decided.
But can we be certain it is so decided? I doubt it very much. It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent. Why this conviction should have arisen in the minds of certain observers and travellers, such as myself, I will now consider. It is indeed a vital question, “May not Islam arise again?”
After the Great War the Turkish power was suddenly restored by one such man. Lastly there is this further point to which attention should be paid:—the attachment (such as it is) of the Mohammedan world in India to English rule is founded mainly upon the gulf between the Mohammedan and Hindu religions. It would seem as though the Great Heresies were granted an effect proportionate to the lateness of their appearance in the story of Christendom.
The English historians do not deny Milton’s materialism; quite recently several English writers on Milton have discoursed at length on his refusal of full Divinity to Our Lord. But this effort at suppression will break down, for one cannot ever hide a thing so important as Milton’s attack, not only on the Incarnation, but on the Creation, and on the Omnipotence of Almighty God.
But Mohammedanism coming as much later than Arianism as Arianism was later than the Apostles has left a profound effect on the political structure of Europe and upon language: even to some extent on science.
... the glory and unity of Byzantine rule disappeared for ever under the attacks of Islam. The Russian Tsardom, oddly enough, took over a maimed inheritance from Byzantium, but it was a very poor reflection of the old Greek splendour. The truth is that Islam permanently wounded the east of our civilization in such fashion the barbarism partly returned. On North Africa its effect was almost absolute and remains so to this day. Europe has been quite unable has been quite unable to reassert herself there. The great Greek tradition has utterly vanished from the Valley of the Nile and from the Delta, unless one calls Alexandria some sort of relic thereof, with its mainly European civilization, French and Italian, but beyond that right up to the Atlantic the old order failed apparently for ever. The French in taking over the administration of Barbary and planting therein a considerable body of their own colonists, of Spaniards, and of Italians, have left the main structure of North African society wholly Mohammedan; and there is no sign of its becoming anything else.