FRANCE IN AFRICA.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXX, Issue 11999, 17 October 1906, Page 4

FRANCE IN AFRICA.

More than 80 years ago France embarked on the conquest of Algiers from motives no more disinterested or creditable — in all probability — than those which inspired Britain from time to time to invade and annex other coxmtries inhabited by nonEuropean races incapable of maintaining a well-ordered civilisation. France — like England — was guilty of not a few mistakes and miscalculations in her Algerian venture, and her difficulties were enormously increased by the misplaced sympathy shown by England with the reactionary efforts of Abd-el-Kadir to withstand the advance of French influence. But who that now makes an impartial survey of Algeria can deny the enormous gain to the indigenous population of that country which, has accrued from French rule? The land has not been taken from them, life and property are absolutely secure, education is widespread, and is in accordance with the religious ideas of the people, either Mohammedan or Christian. Locust plagues have been abated, irrigation has opened vast tracts to profitable agriculture, and, in short, France has resumed in a most effective manner the work which had been taken up by Rome, and which was so lamentably interrupted for centuries by the Islamic upheaval, and, above all, by the Turkish conquest of Algiers, and Tunis in the sixteenth century. Whatever may have been her original intentions, she has not created a new France in North Africa, but a new, a more enlightened, and a vastly happier Numidia, a Barbary that is no longer barbarous. Still more remarkable has been her work in Tunis, a close parallel to that which Britain for almost the same number of years has been carrying out in Egypt. To anyone who knew the Regency of Tunis before it became a French Protectorate, and made acquaintance with that country after 20 years of French administration, the difference is truly remarkable. In Tunis the native dynasty has been preserved and strengthened, and so far from Tunisian nationality having been extinguished by French control, it had a much more real character now as a French Protectorate than as a dependency of Turkey, under whose aegis the population was dwindling, the desert was spreading, and a country which once rivalled Italy in civilisation was becoming almost as much closed to Mediterranean civilisation as is at present the case with Morocco.