They are all naturally industrious farmers, and though the difficulty of cultivating this steep land, combined with the density of the population, makes farming no easy matter, the results are amazing. The growing of cereals holds a minor place in their agriculture, and their attention is chiefly directed to trees, especially the fig and the olive, of which the fruits are regularly exported. Owing to the overcrowded population, however, one finds few large landed proprietors, and the ownership of property is carried to the most ludicrous extremes. For instance, a whole family may own a fig-tree without owning the land on which it grows, and cases have been known of a man who owned an olive-tree hiring out the branches to the olive exporters. The family ideals are the same as among all Berber groups: absolute respect for the head of the family, precedence for the males, but unlike the modern Arab family, no position at all for the women. It is true that polygamy is much rarer here than in the rest of North Africa, but this is largely due to economy rather than to anything else. Otherwise the wife is an absolute slave, and one is at once struck on the roads by the sight of Monsieur riding his mule while Madame trudges behind. As soon as a girl is of marriageable age, and often before, she is bought, and from that moment she must do all her husband’s work, bear and bring up his children and, if he wishes, be divorced. Even if he dies she is not allowed to keep her children, who are taken over by the man’s family as soon as weaned. Moreover, no woman can inherit from a man. When she has passed the period of bearing children she is relegated to the status of a beast of burden. Against this she has much more liberty to go about unattended, and she is not veiled. Small compensation! It is hard to instil different principles into these wild people, as they are very hostile to all forms of European interference, and it is with the utmost difficulty that the children are made to go to the French school. What is still more extraordinary to note is the fact that men who have been educated and who have actually been to Europe will return to their villages and, without the smallest hesitation, rebegin their old life, sleeping on the floor near their donkeys or their horses, while the women chop wood and do the rough work. Neither are these isolated cases as, since the war, many an old soldier, realizing the unequal struggle in his own country, has gone to France as a workman in a factory, and during that period has made money which has been regularly sent back to the family in the mountains, but once weary of Europe he has returned to his people to lead the same life as before. Berbers they were two thousand years ago, Berbers they are still, and, like the men of the Mzab and of the Hoggar, of the Aurès and of the Riff, they remain unaltered, and there seems little prospect of anything changing them.