Quick music comes down the evening street—the clatter of
cavalry—the beautiful rhythm of horses’ backs—flash of
French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting—spahis,
tirailleurs, guns—a gallant and lively scene in the massed
avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper
feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night,
for this is an annual fête-day, and their march commemorates the
entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks
at the faces of the natives in the crowds—impassible. But the
old European cannot but feel a thrill at the sight of France, the
leader of our civilization, again taking charge of the untamed and
reluctant land and its intractable people to which every mastering
empire of the North, from the dawn of our history, has brought in
vain the force of its arms and the light of its intelligence. The
hour has come again, and one feels the presence of the Napoleonic
idea, clad, as of old, in the French arms; for it is from Napoleon,
that star of enlightenment—Napoleon as he was in his Egyptian
campaigns—that the French empire in Africa derives; and if, as the
heir of the Crusades, France was through centuries the protector of
Christians in the East, and that rôle is now done, it is a greater
rôle that she inherits from Napoleon as the friend of Islam, with
the centuries before her. Force, demonstrated in the army, is the
basis of order in all civilized lands; that is why the presence
of the French uniform delights me; but it is not by brute force
that France moves in the essential conquest, nor is it military
lust that her empire in Africa represents and embodies. It is,
rather, a striking instance of fatality in human events that her
advancing career in North Africa presents to the historical mind;
a slight incident—a bey struck one of her ambassadors with a
fan—forced on her the occupation of Algiers, and in the course
of years she found herself saddled with a burden of colonial
empire as awkwardly and reluctantly as was the case with us and
the Philippines. There were anticolonialists in her experiences,
as there were antiimperialists with us; and the arguments were
about the same, essentially, in both cases—the rights of man, a
new frontier, an alien people, with various economic considerations
of revenue, tariff, exploitation. That obscure element of reality,
however, which we call fate, worked on continuously, linking
situation with event, difficulty with remedy, what was done with
what had to be done, till the occupation spread from Algiers into
the mountains, along the seaboard, over the Atlas, into the desert,
absorbing the neighboring land of Tunis, skirting the dangerous
frontier of Morocco—and now the vitalizing and beneficent power
of French civilization, as it might almost seem against the will
of its masters, dominates a vast tract of doubtful empire whose
issues are among the most interesting contingencies of the future
of humanity. It is a great work that has been accomplished, but is
greater in the tasks it opens than in those already achieved.
The policy of pacification and penetration is, indeed, one of the
present glories of France. There has been fierce fighting, hard toils
of war; the land has been the training-school of French generals;
and were it known and written, the story of French campaigning in
the mountains and the desert would prove to be one of those heroic
chapters of fine deeds obscurely done, rich in personal worth,
that of all military glory have most moral greatness. The _esprit_
of the soldiers was like that of devoted and lost bands—they were
there to die. But it belongs to military force to be initial and
preparatory, occasional, in its active expression; thereafter, in its
passivity, it is a guarantee; it is order. The great line of French
administrative policy, whether playing through the army or beyond it,
was, nevertheless, the child and heir of Napoleon’s idea; amity
with Islam. To respect rites, usages, prejudices, to make the leaders
of the people—chiefs, judges, religious heads—intermediaries of
power, to find with patience and consideration the line of least
resistance for civilization by means of the social and racial
organization instead of in opposition thereto, and to display
therewith not a spirit of cold, proud, and superior tolerance but a
frank and interested sympathy—that, at least, was the ideal of the
French way of empire. It had its disinterested elements—respect
for humanity was implicit in it. What strikes the close student of
the movement most is not the military advance but the extraordinary
degree to which the military advance itself was impregnated with
intelligence, scientific observation, scholarly interest, economic
suggestion, engineering ambition, as if these French officers were
less men of arms than pioneers of knowledge and public works. The
publications through fifty years by men in the service on every
conceivable topic relating to the land and its people in scientific,
economic, and historical matters are innumerable; they constitute
a thorough study of vast areas. Such a fact tells its own story—a
story of devotion in a cause of civilization.
Peaceful penetration does not mean merely that the railroad has
entered the Sahara, and the wire gone far beyond into its heart,
and the express messenger crossed the great waste; nor that the
school and, with it, the language are everywhere, subduing and
informing the mind; nor that agricultural science, engineering skill,
economic initiative, and even philanthropic endeavor, hospitals,
hygiene, are at work, or beginning, or in contemplation; but it
means the restoration of a great and almost forsaken tract of the
earth—from the Mediterranean and Lake Tchad to the Niger and the
Atlantic—with its populations, to the benefits of peaceful culture,
safe commerce, humane conditions, and to fraternity with the rest
of mankind. It is not the brilliant military scene that holds my
eye in the packed avenue, with its double rows of trees shadowy in
the air, lined with brilliant shops and stately urban buildings,
opera, cathedral, residence—the familiar modern metropolitan
scene in the electric glare; but I see the work of France all over
the darkened land from the thousand miles of seacoast, up over the
impenetrable Atlas ranges, down endless desert routes—carrying
civilizing power, like a radiating force, through a new world.