------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: ALGIERS: CARVED STONE DOORWAY IN THE NATIVE QUARTER] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _ABOUT ALGERIA_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _I—ARABY’S DAUGHTER_ Europe and the Mediterranean—Algiers—The clash of civilizations—Things ancient and modern—The strangers’ quarter—Arabs, Berbers, Moors, Jews, and others—A tale of a telegram. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ “E’en now the devastation is begun And half the business of destruction done.” GOLDSMITH. Some of the ashes of the Roman Empire have been recovered. The Mediterranean is once more a European lake. The Turk indeed still holds its eastern shores; the amazing Sultanate of Morocco yet persists in the west; strong, after the manner of Barbary for centuries, in the jealousies of Europe. Yet the Turk, while maintaining his assertion of the Unity of the Godhead, which divides him from Christendom, is, nevertheless, in other ways almost to be accounted a member of the European family; and even in the vigorous days of the Empire the wild tribes of the Greater Atlas recked little of the might and majesty of Rome. These are the limitations; our concern is with the achievement, and especially with the fertile country, once Rome’s granary, now after a thousand years of neglect and abasement restored to the orderly uses of civilized man. We are to visit a land unsurpassed in the variety of its historical vicissitudes, and strewn with the stones of many empires; a land where to-day a European nation, cherishing, perhaps more than any other, Roman traditions in its law and polity, controls by force of arms and of character a vast and heterogeneous population, previously united only in its submission to the brooding blight of Islam.