n his
own way. Could the sultan have been held responsible for the piracies of
his nominal vassal, they would have been put an end to a century sooner.
He could not control the dey because the dey could not control the
Kabyles. At the village of Tiza-Terga is shown--or was a year or two
ago--a curious field-piece of hexagonal form abandoned by the Turks in
the seventeenth century after an unsuccessful attack on the Kabyle
stronghold of Koukou. When the dey yielded to the French he conveyed
what he was unable to deliver, and the conquest of the country has been
going on ever since. This process of subjugation is anything but
steady. The years of tranquillity outnumber those of disturbance, and
that disproportion, already very great, may be said to be increasing. In
the long intervals of peace everything goes on smoothly. The natives
busy themselves in their fields and their simple workshops, content with
the occasional effervescence of a town-quarrel. The exports of the
province mount up rapidly. France felicitates herself on the brilliant
success of her experiment, sends over small groups of immigrants and
occupies herself with projects of vast prospective value. Paper railways
permeate the gorges of the Djurjura Mountains, and paper canals lead the
waters of the Mediterranean into the desert basin beyond. She repairs
some of the Roman aqueducts, builds wooden bridges, keeps at bay the
purely predatory tribes of the interior, and protects industry as
certainly it never was protected under the Turks. She manifests a
sincere wish to make the tri-color a blessing to Africa, and with time
and no disaster at home bids fair to succeed.

[Illustration: KABYLE ARMORERS AT WORK.]

Were she to be driven out to-day, the traces of her beneficent sway
would be more marked than those left by her predecessors, or by _their_
predecessors the Vandals. They could not possibly be less so. The
mission of both these was fruitful chiefly of disorder and devastation.
Compared with them, the natives whom they ruled against incessant
protest were the representatives of civilization. The Arabs built a few
forts on the beach to shelter piracy. What the Vandals left were burnt
and overthrown walls, the memory of some religious riots, and a small
library of pious polemics. Between them, they held the country for
fifteen centuries: the Romans had it for four. All the moles and
artificial forts, numerous and often massive; all the aqueducts, some of