ALGERIA AND THE ALGERINES.

(From Jottings on Men and Things, by the Special Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.)

. . . . .The other day the mayor of an Algerian town presented to his Majesty as a kind of phenomenal heroine a poor little girl of fifteen, whose parents had been murdered, and who herself had been shamefully maltreated by the natives. The Emperor received her paternally, and appeared horrified at the recital of the outrages committed upon her. "I knew nothing of these atrocities!" he exclaimed, "Nothing has been told me about them."
Of course, "atrocities" do not enter into the official programme of ecstatic loyalty but they are, nevertheless, among the commonest features of colonisation. In the smoke of how many thousand Indian wigwams have hung the golden-haired scalps of Anglo-Saxon women and children ? No country was ever yet wrested by a civilised from a barbarous people without the burning down of houses, the chopping off of heads, and the maltreatment of the feeble and unprotected; and in many instances the civilised have been guilty of atrocities is execrable is those committed by savages. "But" contend the dogmatists, "the Arabs, although barbarous in many of their usages have a certain kind of civilisation. Moreover, they are three millions strong, among whom can be reckoned, at the lowest computation, three hundred thousand muskets and yataghans with soldiers is brave is any Frenchman to wield them. We do not wish to extirpate them is the Anglo- Saxons have extirpated the North American Indians. We wish to live in peace with them to civilise them and to convert them into loyal subjects of the Emperor Napoleon. The theory is admirable but how is it to be put into practice. What is meant by civilising the Arabs—that word which is perpetually in the mouth of every Frenchman you meet? Civilisation, from a French point of view, means hats, coats, boots, table d'hote dinners, cafès chantants, masked balls in Carnival time, wigs, hair dye, kid gloves, bonnets paintings in oil and water colours, quadrilles and polkas, overtures to "Semiramide," and pots pourris from the "Affricaine," the Pompes Funebres, dominoes and piquet, the novels of MM Feydeau and Flangergues, and the Code Napoleon. I am not aware of any other considerable elements in French civilisation, save, perhaps grand hotels, the songs of Mademoiselle Theresa, rolls on the drum, the demi-monde, and the Academy of Inscription and Belles Lettres. What on earth is the Arab to do with French civilisation. He won't wear hats, or coats, or boots. He eats with his fingers. He has his cafes chantants; but then only one song, and that only five thousand years old, is sung night after night to the music of one lute, one tambourine, and one timbrel, all dating from the time when Miriam exulted in the sinking of the horse and his rider in Egypt's dark sea. The Pompes Funebres concern him not. He observes no dark ceremonial of sorrow. You may see an Arab funeral every day in the cemeteries of Algiers. When a true believer dies, they dress him in his best burnous pop him into an open chest gaily painted, and cover all save his face with carpets, or silken stuffs, or dirty rags, according to the rank of the deceased and then six sturdy fellow hoist this bier on their shoulders, and scamper away with it is fast as ever their legs wall carry them to the burying ground. Arrived there, the corpse is turned out of the chest on the ground and denuded. Then a professional person comes with soap and water and a handful of flax and scrubs the dead man all over, and then, uncoffined and unshrouded, he is hidden away in the bosom of his pitying mother earth, and the painted chest serves for somebody else who dies next day. To civilise the Arab in an undertaking sense, you must give him men in rusty black, with cocked hats and red noses, coffins, palls, and black velvet draperies, with his cipher, nine or none, emblazoned thereon to say nothing of wax candles, holy water, incense, cross-bearers, a priest, and two or three choristers. These undertaking paraphernalia are all more or less connected with the religion of civilisation and that religion is Christianity. The Arab believes in his heart of hearts that the Christian is in infidel and a dog. Do you wish to civilise him with regard to marriage. His customs which are his religion, enforce the inclaustration of women at home, or their concealment under a veil when abroad there can be no courtship. The Mahometan girl is sold to a man she has never seen, and after the honeymoon the most strenuous efforts of the husband are directed towards the counteraction of that which he deems to be the predominant idea in his wife's mind—the desire to commit adultery. As for quadrilles and polkas, the only Moorish women who dance in public are public women. As for novels, the Arabs, not being priests, schoolmasters, or scribes, are not given either to reading or to writing, and their only acquaintance with fiction is derived from a few scandalous excerpts from the " Arabian Nights"—not more scandalous perhaps than the civilised "Fanny" or "Madame Bovary"—related by professional storytellers in the coffeehouses or from the blackguard performances of the puppet-show called Karagheus, corrupted by the French into Garagousse—the Arab Punch. If you offer the Arab the Code Napoleon, he tells you that the Koran is enough for him. He has a demi-monde of his own, and in lieu of frequenting a grand hotel he retires to a caravanserai, where he sups off half a pancake, a draught of sour milk, and a handful of dates, and wrapping himself up in a camel's hair cloak, he goes to sleep on a floor of baked mud. This is what the Arab really is, and these are the alternatives which the French offer him I leave you to draw the obvious deduction.
But there is another, a better, a purer civilisation, some kind-hearted people at home may think, which the Arabs would gladly accept, and from which they might derive inestimable blessings. The French, it may be, benighted foreigners and Romanists as they are, can exhibit to the Mahometan mind only a garbled and imperfect Evangel. How would it be if we tried these Paynims with the genuine British article?
We have tried the experiment in India, both among Hindoos and Mahometans, at the cost of millions, and with what success all the world and the missionary societies know. Could anything be done to civilise the Arabs from an English point of view—I mean by way of tracts, Sunday schools, tight-lacing, police reports, mothers' meetings, penny readings, district visiting, the cane, savings banks, working-men's clubs, lending libraries, and Holloway's pills. The effort is worth making, at all events the stern simplicity of the Protestant ritual might find more favour in the eyes of the Moslems than the gaudy and meretricious ceremonial of Romanism. Nothing can be plainer than a mosque ; a Dissenting chapel is gorgeous in comparison with its naked unadornment. Whitewashed walls, a few mats on the floor, a hole in the wall to hold the Koran, a pulpit like a washhouse copper with the lid off, and a couple of ostrich eggs dangling to string from the dome, and this is all. Again, there is no indisposition among the Mahometans to examine the grounds on which their faith is built. Their sacred volume is no sealed book to them. All who can read do literally search their Scriptures from morning till night, and those who cannot read have the Koran daily and hourly read and expounded to them. There is scarcely a camel-driver or a porter who has not more chapters of the Koran by heart than an English National-school child has verses. Wild, savage, vindictive, and debauched, no reasonable persons can deny that the Arabs are eminently religious. They believe unfeignedly in what their prophet has taught them ; and, alone among the religionists of the world, they practise the precepts of their scriptures. Here, then, is a people predisposed, it would seem, for religious instruction. They are grave and courteous in controversy, patient listeners, and fond of long discourses. When an affluent English colony is permanently settled in Algiers—when there shall be English chemists' shops on the Boulevard de l'Impératrice, an English City Mission on the Place du Gouvernement, and an English ragged school in the Faubourg of Bab-el-Oued—great things may be wrought among a deluded generation. A dear good lady, named Rogers—yes, Mrs. Albert G. Rogers is the name—did come out here last winter with her husband, an estimable English clergyman and essay to convert the heathen by means of tracts. I have heard much of her pious exertions in Algiers. Her mission seemed to have been a double barrelled one, for she was desirous of demolishing at once the arch-impostor Mahomet, and that wicked old man the Pope of Rome. She smote the Mussulman and the Romanist hip and thigh with many tracts, and must have vexed Belial sorely; only she appears to have been in a state of dubiety as to who were the most wicked people in Algiers, the Arabs, the French, or the small English community resident there. Between these three stools, however difficult the feat may seem, Mrs. Albert G. Rogers got on worse than might have been expected, and she failed in converting anybody. She accordingly shook the dust from off her feet, and returned to Europe.
As in a violent dispute between two doctors over a sickbed, the eminent Sangrado is all for phlebotomy, while the equally eminent Diafoirus is invincible in his devotedness to drastics, but neither think it worth their while to ask the principal person concerned, to wit, the patient, how he would like to be treated, so the Algerian controversy has hitherto been conducted without any reference to two parties most immediately interested in its settlement—the native Arabs and the French colonists. One need be no conjurer to predict that, were the natives polled, the all but unanimous expression of opinion, from his Moorish Highness Prince Mustapha down to the lowest donkey-driver, would be, "Get out of the country and leave us alone." Such a step, it has already been demonstrated, is impossible. The French can no more evacuate Algeria than we can evacuate Ireland ; only Algeria in the reign of Napoleon III very much resembles Ireland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. There are Lords of the Pale, and Lords outside the Pale, friendly natives and hostile natives, and any number of "wild Irishes" or Arabs fighting occasionally among themselves, but all agreed as to the desirability of getting rid of the French. Even among the sedentary Moors, a most quiet, gentle, and inoffensive race, there prevails an impression that they have been somehow swindled or cozened out of their country by the Gaul. "You took Algiers," they urge, "as an act of revenge because Husseen Dey hit your Consul in the eye with a fly-flapper. Boùrmont Pasha landed at Sidi Ferruch, the Casbah capitulated, and the Consul was avenged. You drove away the Turks—that was well; it was a Turk who hit M. Dejean in the eye—a Moor would have been too well-bred to think of such a thing. Well, you concluded, having taken Algiers, to keep it. That was very well too; for the Janissaries were rude, swaggering creatures, and led us poor Moors a terrible life. But what right had you to go up in the mountains and worry the Kabyles. They never manned pirate ships , they never hit your Consul. They are sober and industrious folks, who have enjoyed their independence since the days of Iskander the Great, Sultan of the World. What business had you to seize Oran and Constantine, which were separate beyliks, tributary to, but otherwise independent of, Algiers?" The French can reply, as we do in India, that their gradual course of conquest has been forced upon them by the inevitable logic of circumstances. Qui a bu, boira. We English can only wonder the French have not annexed Tunis and Morocco by this time. But the Moors cannot be brought to see the force of the fatal exigencies of civilisation. They have gotten hold of a French word very forcibly expressing then sense of the manner in which the French have become possessors of so much of North Africa "Mais ces Francais," they complain, " ils nous ont ca-a-a-rrottis." To "carottir" any one, say an uncle or a creditor, is to "chizzle" or "chouse" or "do" him out of his property amidst assurances of highflown benevolence and exalted integrity. The Arabs persist in asserting that they have been carrottis by their present masters. In the towns they are not actively inimical to their rule, for they acknowledge perforce that clean and well swept streets, an efficient police, and strict security for life and property are preferable, even at the hands of giaours, to the filth, the disease, the bowstring, and the bastinado which flourished in the old days of their Turkish masters. If you take up any abstract of Algerine history, you will come, at about every page or so, to a summary similar to the following :—
Ali-ben-Moustafa Dey, deposed; Moustafa ben Ali-Pasha Dey reigned three weeks, strangled; plague; grasshoppers; several fires; war declared against Hamburg. In fact, an epitome of the entire history of Barbary might be written with very slight variations of the foregoing theme. But the natives, while they acknowledge the change for the better which has taken place since the conquest, are but faintly grateful for it. The benefits they have experienced have been the work of a people alien to them in blood, in speech, and in manners and in creed. It is not, perhaps, quite correct to compare the feelings which they hold towards the French with those which the Hindoos hold towards us. They hate us, heartily enough it is true, but they acknowledge us as superiors , we are the Sahibs, booted and spurred, and with strong whips, who ride upon their backs. They hate us, but with a cowering, cringing loathing—the aversion mingled with fear which the black man has towards the white. Moreover, the Sahib has ruled in India for many generations, and for a hundred years at least has had the upper hand. The Arabs are no soft and effeminate creatures like the Hindoos, whom a punch in the midriff may kill. The Kabyles have often been likened to the Sikhs, but it is to the Moors and Arabs of the plains that I am alluding. There is, in the first place, no inferiority on their side as regards colour, they are dark or fair, swarthy or pale, sometimes a dusky red, sometimes a singular blonde, but always unmistakably Caucasian, never to be confounded with "niggers." An Arab gentleman can trace his descent much farther back than the majority of French marquises ; he will not even condescend enter his horses for a race at which animals belonging to Europeans under a certain rank are allowed to compete. He is the strictest of Conservatives, both in politics and religion, and holds democracy and freethinking alike in horror. Finally, he has only been conquered since the day before yesterday, and his reduction has been accomplished by a people whom for centuries his forefathers were accustomed to browbeat and to despise.
When it is borne in mind that there are several respectable old Moors in Algiers who, in their time, have owned French slaves to work in their gardens, to build their houses, to cook their dinners, and to fill their pipes—slaves whom they could cudgel, if they so chose, within an inch of their lives —a very ample reason may be found for the gall and bitterness with which they behold the spectacle of the countrymen of then whilom bondservants riding about on Arab horses, stretching their legs on the luxurious divans of the palaces of Moustafa and Hussein Dey, and professing to teach the true believers out of their own Koran that obedience to the Caliph of the Infidels was one of the prime maxims inculcated by the prophet Mahomet.

 The Sydney Morning Herald  1865,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13118811