Page:The Burton Holmes lectures; (IA burtonholmeslect04holm).pdf/41

 ALGIERS FROM THE KASBAH By Permission

people. He struck the French consul across the face with a fan during an angry interview, thus precipitating the war of conquest for which France had long been waiting an adequate excuse. And while we wander through the streets and across the squares of modern Algiers and up into the narrow byways of the native quarter, let us review the story of the Barbary corsairs from the time when they first became formidable in the sixteenth century down to that day in 1830 when their ruler administered that fatal slap to the representative of France, a nation at that time prepared and eager to attack the scourge of Christendom. The Arabs, as we know, invaded Africa and penetrated into Spain in the eighth century. In the fifteenth century the Saracens were thrust