“This Tunis,” as Shakespeare says, “was Carthage.”[4] It afterwards became in turn Africa Propria, Zeugitania, and Byzacium. Numerous authors have handed down to posterity the history of its remote antiquity, but the Tunis of to-day was little better than a _terra incognita_ when the events of the French invasion forced the fact of its existence on the attention of Europe and England. The Gulf of Tunis and the now land-locked harbour of Bizerta command the passage of the narrow sea before them, and hence arises the maritime importance of Tunis in the past, the present, and the future. All writers, except modern diplomatists, fully recognise this fact; but unfortunately the statesmen of to-day are not only intent on deceiving each other, but are forced by the exigencies of party to know as little as possible. If the position of Tunis had been as familiar to Englishmen in 1878 as it is now, we might never have witnessed the events of 1881. “If the Tunis lake were only dredged and deepened,” writes Commandant Villot, “and the coast fortified, and if a powerful navy were stationed in the Tunisian roadstead, not only the path to Egypt, but the road to India through the Suez Canal, would once more be closed to the people of the West.”[5] A concession to dredge and deepen the Tunis lake has, as a matter of course, followed the Treaty of Kasr-es-Said, and although M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire wrote to Lord Granville on the 16th May 1881 that “France has no more desire to annex Bizerta than any other part of Tunis,” a project for the restoration of its port by French capitalists is now receiving the serious consideration of the French Government. Mr. Perry in his work on Tunis sums up very fairly the state of the case in a few words. “Tunis,” he writes, “has the finest position in North Africa. Commercial preponderance and the control of the Mediterranean are the attractions for the Powers which dispute with each other for its possession or its neutralisation.”[6] The Regency of Tunis is bounded on both the north and east by the Mediterranean, on the west by Algeria, on the south by the Sahara of the Touaregs, and on the south-east by Tripoli. It has an area of about sixty thousand square miles, and a sea-coast 550 miles in length. The population of the whole country does not far exceed 1,500,000 souls. The configuration of Tunis is almost identical with that of Algeria. Like Algeria, Tunis has its mountains, its plains, and its coast (_sahel_). Like Algeria, its mineral wealth is almost unequalled. The rocks of Tunis yield nearly all minerals except gold. Its chief river is the Roman Bagradas—the modern Medjerdah, which rises in the Algerian province of Constantine, and after a tortuous course of over three hundred miles reaches the Mediterranean at Porto-Farina near the city of Tunis. The streams in the south of the Regency are comparatively unimportant, and generally end in the great marsh-lakes or Sebkhas of Kairwán, Faráoun, or El Medir.