The administration of the tribe comes directly under French control. It is committed to a chief who is not allowed to interfere with the local affairs of the villages composing the tribe. But pressure in the direction of centralization is gradually being employed by the French, in accordance with the political notions and genius of that nation. It needs, however, to be used with extreme caution, as warning catastrophes still occur to prove. The solemn engagement made when the Kabyles capitulated in 1857, to rigidly respect their public customs and their communal elections, will enforce itself upon the more or less sincere attention of the invaders as long as they possess the country. The stormy clanhood that insists on the luxury of at least an annual fight among neighbors is often the last hold of national independence. [Illustration: THE POLLS: MODEL VOTERS.] France is not the first suzerain who has found it hard to rule, and indispensable to sedulously humor, these restless indigenes. They were quite as troublesome to the Turks. The dey of Algiers was but a nominal branch of the home house at Constantinople. Thanks to his Kabyle constituents, he did business pretty much on his own account and in 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.]