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210 COMMERCE WITH, &C. ages. The voyage, with the visits to Mecca and Medina, are seldom performed in less than four or five years, and are usually attended with great trouble and expence. Could the clever and prudent founder of Mahomedanism have ever contemplated the spread of his religion beyond the confines of Arabia, he would not have been so indiscreet as to have made a visit to Mecca an imperative precept of it. He had certainly never heard the name of a single island out of the hundreds which compose the country of the distant nations who now put themselves to such peril and inconvenience in obe- dience to his wanton mandate.
