ch of hopeful force left in the Kabyle, artisan,
agriculturist or adventurer, is creditable to him, and suggests "an
original glory not yet lost." He obstinately refuses to accept the sheer
professional vagabondism of the Arab, confident, as it were, that the world
has in reserve better use for him than that. "Day-dawn in Africa" will
probably gild his hills sooner than the tufted swamps of Guinea or the
slimy huts of the Nile. A class of missionaries quite different from the
Livingstones and the Moffatts have devoted themselves to his improvement.
They approach him in a different way, and begin on his commercial and
industrial side, not on the spiritual. The latter does not appear to be by
any means so accessible. Unlike the Ashantees, the Kafirs and the M'pongwe,
he was a Christian once, and may become one again. But he is not going to
be evangelized on the hurrah system; and that fact his new rulers, with all
their alleged defects as reformers and colonizers, have sense enough to
recognize. The new faith must push its way in the rear of works. Peace,
good government, good roads, better implements and methods of labor will
promote the enlightenment necessary to its success.
Bougie, the port of Eastern Kabylia, lying under Cape Carbon, has one
Catholic church, standing in the midst of new streets, squares and public
constructions indicative of prosperity wrought by the French regime. It is
still in need of easy communication with the interior, having but one
road--one more than in the time of the Turks. Wax is the chief commodity
traversing that line of traffic. That circumstance has, however, nothing to
do with the name of the town. The name was there when the French came, as
was the wax, and very little else but ruins. If the present state of
improvement has been effected with so little aid from good roads, what
would not a number of them accomplish? A railway running to the other end
of the province longitudinally through its centre would have but one ridge
to overcome, and would find a very fair business ready for it. The railway
and vandalism, in the proverbial sense of the word, could not coexist.
When the Vandals buy railway-tickets and ship fat oxen on fast stock-trains
the African world will move. Nobody ever heard of chronic war between two
adjacent railroad-stations, or of a gang of raiders dressed only in shirts
and armed with spears and matchlocks going out on the morning mail for a
day's shooting among the
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