Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/243

 relatively speaking, even been more rapidly peopled by European immigrants than the English possessions in South Africa. It is not an industrial field or an immense farm like Java, or British India, which are often wrongly spoken of as "colonies," and too often also held up as examples to the military powers of Europe. Like Canada, although under other political conditions, it has become a second France beyond the seas. Taken altogether, the work of the conquering nation, mixed with good and ill and very complicated in its effects, like all human works, has not had the general result of diminishing and debasing the natives. There are doubtless men who demand that the historical law of an eye for an eye

should be meted out to the Arabs, and that they should be "driven" towards the desert, as they formerly drove the Berbers towards the mountains. In many parts of the Tell and the outskirts of the towns these processes have already been even put in practice, in an indirect but legal way, "by means of expropriation for the public benefit." But most of the Arabs are still in possession of their lands, and what remains to them would be quite sufficient to support them if it belonged to the peasantry themselves, and not to great chiefs who really own it in the name of the tribe. In spite of the injustice and cruelties which accompany every act of