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Conquest and Colonisation in North Africa
Conquest and Colonisation in North Africa Author:George Wingrove Cooke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. THE COAST OF ALGERIA—ALGIERS TO PHILIPPEVILLE. Liberality Of Trench System Errors In Political Economy Prohibition Of Commercial Packet-boa... more »ts In Order To Make Work For French Navy DiffiCulties Of Getting From Algiers To Constantine Getting Tickets For The " Phare" The Deck Of The "phare"—The Ladies' Cabin Of The "phare"—The Coast-line Dellis Landing Powder Cigabs And Lucifer-matches Political Importance Of Dellis The Kabyles At Home Djigelli A Town Destroyed By An Earthquake The Deserted Wife The Story Of The Earthquake The Last Night In The "phare." Writing as I am in Algeria, I am afraid my ideas will be thought in England to be those of an optimist ; but I must confess to a very strong admiration of the manner in which military and civil business is transacted here. I have had more opportunities than can fall to the lot of most men of seeing how the machine works. Everything is done liberally, and yet economically. For an adequate object, such as making a pestiferous town healthy, or adapting a corps of troops to a necessary service, the French are dismayed by no number of figures. If a book is useful, they set it up in type, and let the author take as many copies as he pleases, paying for the paper. If a portion of the country is unknown, they send the best antiquaries and botanists, and engineers and statists, they have in their service, and produce a return which exhausts the whole subject: witness the Exploration Scientifique, which, although published at a marvellously cheap rate, costs £100, and fills five portmanteaus. Yet there is no want of proper checks—no jobs, no masses of idle gossip printed large, and bound in blue paper; no gross engineering blunders (except, perhaps, in the character of their buildings in regar...« less