1912] French Policy in Algeria 385 



there will be riots. Fortunately these things do not affect us here in 

 Sussex (where we have not a single mine or factory). 



" I have been reading Eversley's ' Gladstone in Ireland ' — a good 

 and useful book which gives the public facts fairly. But history writ- 

 ten as this is under the House of Commons restrictions of suppressing 

 private conversations and refraining from assigning private motives 

 for public action cannot be satisfactory. How futile to go on repre- 

 senting Parnell's neglect of his public duties to ill-health instead of to 

 its true cause, Mrs. O'Shea, or Hartington's implacable opposition to 

 Home Rule to anything but his brother's assassination. Yet there is 

 no hint of either of these veracities in Eversley's book. All the same 

 the book is a good one, and its writer was a good friend to me at the 

 time of my trial at Portumna, the only man in Parliament with a front 

 bench position who had the courage to support me there. 



" 13th April. — Farid writes from Constantinople, whither he has 

 fled from Cairo to avoid arrest and perhaps four years imprisonment 

 for a speech made at a general meeting of the National Party. I think 

 he is quite right to have made this hcgira, as he can be of more use 

 at Constantinople, and the present regime at Cairo against which it is 

 useless to struggle until the Ottoman Empire is in a position to insist. 

 It appears that Saad Zaghloul has resigned at Cairo, having refused 

 to prosecute Farid. 



" 14th April (Sunday). — Young Borthwick came again to talk about 

 his scheme of joining the Turks in Tripoli. It has developed now into 

 the idea of fitting up an old man-of-war with which to land artillery 

 somewhere on the coast. Of this the Turkish Embassy in London ap- 

 proves. He has an old connection with Turkey through his father, who 

 was in the Ottoman service, and went through the campaign of Plevna, 

 and he himself was born at Constantinople. He is also nephew to the 

 Borthwick of the ' Morning Post,' a good looking, active young fellow, 

 who knows Arabic, having lived, he tells me, for a year in a village in 

 Oran, and having accompanied the French expedition to Fez. He gave 

 me a detailed account of the rogueries that go on officially in Algeria 

 from the Governor-General downwards. Borthwick's business in Al- 

 geria was to buy land for an English company, and thus he became ac- 

 quainted with the way in which things are done there. The French 

 officials in charge of large districts get only 200 francs a month pay, 

 and are allowed to make what money they can out of the Arabs; the 

 taxes are farmed out, and the officials make a profit by lending money 

 on usury to the Arab landowners to enable them to pay the rates im- 

 posed (£4 a year is the rate for each plough), and then to foreclose, 

 and get possession of the land. It is a settled policy of the French 

 Government to get rid of the native population, and replace it with 



