THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN” Drop Cap S SINCE the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line, and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her dominion across the Middle Sea. Ever since the purple sails of Phoenicia first flaunted along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans in 1803 of the frigate Philadelphia, which had run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic. A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan oases. Under the Turkish rÉgime the districts of Tripoli and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a vali, or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a mutes-sarif directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the barren interior plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five miles in width, of an altogether remarkable fertility, for its deep ravines, filled with considerable streams during the winter rains, continue to send down a supply of subterranean water even during the dry season. By means of countless wells, round and round which blindfolded donkeys and oxen plod ceaselessly, the water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted thence to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad date and olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of the coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with the luscious, mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior oases; from November to April the orange groves are ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa; the early spring sees the shipment of those “Malta potatoes” which are quoted on the menus of every fashionable hostelry and restaurant in Europe; while lemons are to be had for the picking at almost any season of the year. Southward into the Sahara from the southern borders of Tripoli stretches the province of Fezzan, its inaccessibility, its prevalent malaria, and its deadly heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid, of unsavoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced courtiers and overpopular officials, presumably because of the exceeding improbability of any of them ever coming back. Artesian wells and scientific farming have proved in other and equally discouraging quarters of Africa, however, that the words “desert” and “worthless” are no longer synonymous, so there is no reason to believe that the agricultural miracles which France has performed in Algeria and Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as “the granary of Europe.” What has been done once may well be done again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, will predict a promising agricultural future for an Italian Tripolitania. In its physical aspects, northern Tripolitania resembles Europe much more than it does Africa; its climate is no warmer than southern Italy in summer and not nearly as unhealthy as the Campagna Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist is the peninsula of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, officially known as the Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its many natural advantages of climate, soil, and vegetation making it the most favoured region in the regency, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate and vegetation of southern Tripoli and of Fezzan are distinctly Saharan, the date-palm being the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an inextricably mixed population and one of the worst harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its excellent roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian frontier and the Canal, Germany has long had a covetous eye on; and the insignificant ports of Derna and Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being occupied by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the Aujila and Kufra chains of oases, marking the course of the historic caravan route to Upper Egypt and presenting the aspect of a long, winding valley, extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all of these sand-surrounded islands have water in abundance, that of Jof, for example, supporting over a million date-palms and several thousand people, together with their camels, horses, and goats. Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian fellaheen were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the East, a visit to the town of Tripoli is more interesting than enjoyable. Both its harbour and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no one ever visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. The harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if anything, than that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I know of which deserves to be classed with the Albergo Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to the native jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuccoed houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked Moslem women flit like ghosts, and vaulted, trellis-roofed bazaars where traders of two-score nationalities haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter the while they and their wares and the passing camels Follow the narrow Strada della Marina past the custom-house, where the Italian sentry peers at you suspiciously from beneath the bunch of cock's feathers which adorns his helmet; past the odorous fish-market and so into the unpaved, unlighted, foul-smelling quarter of the Jews, and your path will be blocked eventually by the sole remaining relic of Tripoli's one-time greatness, the marble arch of triumph erected by the Romans in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried in dÉbris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its arches ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in dried fish. In that defaced and degraded memorial is typified the latter-day history of Tripolitania. Before the Italian occupation disrupted the commerce of the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by long odds the most interesting of the city's sights were the markets, which were held upon the beach on the arrival of the trans-Saharan caravans, for they afforded the foreigner fleeting but characteristic glimpses, as though on a moving-picture screen, of those strange and savage peoples—Berbers, Hausas, Tuaregs, Tubbas, and Wadaians—who are retreating farther and farther into the recesses of the continent before the white man's implacable advance. All down the ages Tripoli has been the gateway through which weapons, cutlery, and cotton have entered, and slaves, ostrich feathers, and ivory have come out of inner Africa by plodding caravan. Since the sons of Ham first found their way across the wilderness of Shur, this region has been the terminus of three historic trade routes. The first of these runs due south across the desert to Lake Tchad and the great native states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, and Wadai; the second follows a southwesterly course across the Sahara to the Great Bend of the Niger and the storied city of Timbuktu; while the third, going south by east, long carried British cottons and German jack-knives to the natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, then, that, fired by the speeches of the expansionists in the Roman senate, all Italy should dream of a day when the red-white-and-green banner should float over this gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton goods from Milan, should go rolling southward to those countries which lie beyond the great sands? But, lost in the fascination of their dream, the Italians forgot one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back of a camel. No longer may Tripolitania be reckoned the front door, or even the side door, to central Africa. As the result of French and British encroachment and enterprise, not only has nearly all of the Tripolitanian hinterland been absorbed by one or the other of these powers, but, what is of far more commercial importance, they have succeeded in diverting the large and important The statesmen who planned, and the soldiers and sailors who executed, the seizure of Tripolitania, were obeying a voice from the grave. Though the overwhelming disaster to the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when their army of invasion was wiped out by Menelik's Abyssinian tribesmen, caused the political downfall of Crispi, the greatest Italian of his time, his dream of Italian colonial expansion, like John Brown's soul, went marching on. With the vision of a prophet that great statesman saw that the day was not far distant when the steady increase in Italy's population and production would compel her to acquire a colonial market oversea. Crispi lies mouldering in his grave, but the Italian Government, in pursuance of the policy which he inaugurated, has been surreptitiously at work in Tripolitania these dozen years or more. Never has that forerunner to annexation known as “pacific penetration” been more subtly or more systematically conducted. Even the Pope lent the government's policy of African aggrandisement his sanction, for is not the Moslem the hereditary foe of the church, and does not the cross follow close in the wake of Christian bayonets? Italian convents and monasteries dot the Tripolitanian littoral, while cowled and sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian Though prior to the war there were probably not two thousand native-born Italians in the whole of Tripolitania, the numerous Jews, in whose hands was practically the entire trade of the country, were offered inducements of one kind and another to become Italian subjects, Italy thus laying a foundation for her claims to predominating interests in that region. On the pretext that the Turkish authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, Italy demanded and obtained permission to establish her own post-offices at the principal ports, so that for many years past the anomalous spectacle has been presented, just as in other portions of the Turkish Empire, of letters from a Turkish colony being franked with surcharged Italian stamps. The most ingenious stroke, however, was the establishment of numerous Italian schools—and very good schools they are—where the young idea, whether Arab, Maltese, or Jew, has been taught to shoot—along Italian lines. To those really conversant with the situation, Italy's pretexts that the activities of her subjects resident in Tripolitania had been interfered with and their lives and interests seriously endangered sound somewhat hollow. To tell the truth, Italians have had a freer rein in the regency—and, incidentally, have caused more trouble—than any other people. Italy's real reasons for the seizure of Tripolitania were two, and only two: first, she wanted it; and second, she could get it. Now that she has Tripolitania in her grasp, however, her task is but begun, for setting forward the hands of progress by occupation of Moslem territory has ever been a perilous proceeding. Though France shouldered the white man's burden in Algeria with alacrity, she paid for the privilege with just forty years of fighting; it took England, with all the resources of her colonial experience and her colonial army, sixteen years to conquer the ill-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while the desperate resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribesmen has compelled her practically to evacuate Somaliland; overthrown ministries, depleted war-chests, and thousands of unmarked graves in the hinterland bear witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the cause of civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; Russia spent a quarter of a century and the lives of ten thousand soldiers in forcing her beneficent rule on the Moslems of Turkestan. Italy will be more fortunate than her colonising neighbours, therefore, if she emerges unscathed from her present Tripolitanian adventure, When Italy pointed the noses of her transports Tripoliward she committed the incredible blunder of underestimating for a second time the resistance that she would encounter. She made just such a mistake some years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is still sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her annihilated army. The Italian agents in Tripolitania had assured their government that, as a result of Turkish oppression, corruption, and overtaxation, the Turks were heartily disliked by the Tripolitanians—all of which was perfectly true. But when they went on to say that the Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion of the Turks and the substitution of an Italian rÉgime, they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm reception—with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble in taking Tripolitania as we should in taking Hayti, instead To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in which Italy finds herself, you should understand that the portly, sleepy-eyed, good-natured old gentleman who theoretically rules Turkey under the title of Mohammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual personality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Turkey, or, to give him his proper title, Emperor of the Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler of some twenty-four millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled Turkish subjects—Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews—and in that capacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous unrest, a fierce consciousness that the lands which they have for centuries regarded as their own are gradually slipping from them, and a decision that they must fight or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world to-day who will remain indifferent to any action which hints at the dismemberment of Turkey, for he knows full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven. That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns as long as her ammunition, her patience, and her public purse hold out, no one acquainted with the conditions of modern warfare will attempt to deny. Unless, however, the militant section of Islam, of which this region To American ears the word “Senussiyeh” doubtless conveys but little meaning, but to the French administrateurs in Algeria and Tunisia, and to the officers of the Military Intelligence Department in Egypt and the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, the most powerful organisation of its kind in the world, so complete is the veil of secrecy behind which it works It is no secret that the growing power of the Senussiyeh is causing considerable concern to the military and political officials of those European nations that have possessions in North Africa, for, in addition to the three-hundred-odd zawias, or monasteries, scattered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy the regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the The organisation of the order is both strong and simple. The khuan, or brothers, whose names are carefully recorded in the books of the mother lodge at Jof, owe unquestioning obedience to the mokaddem, or prefect, in charge of the district to which they belong. Each mokaddem has under his orders a corps of secret agents, known as wekils, whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. On Grand Bairam—the Mohammedan Easter—the mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political condition of the order is discussed and its course of action decided on for the ensuing year. Above the mokaddems, and acting as an intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred person of the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, by means of a remarkable system of camel couriers, are enabled to keep constantly in touch with all the districts of the order. At Jof, from which no European investigator has ever returned, are centred all the threads of this vast organism. There is kept the war-chest of the order, constantly increased by large and small contributions from true believers all over the world, for every member of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than twenty dollars a year must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it would be hard to imagine. Here, surrounded by inhospitable desert, with wells a long day's camel-ride apart, and the route known only to experienced and loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, and arm his disciples, to accumulate great stores of arms and ammunition, and to push forward his propaganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated Islam, without any possibility of interference from the Christian nations. There seems to be but little doubt that factories have been erected at Jof for the assembling of weapons of precision, the materials for which have been systematically smuggled across the Mediterranean from Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand master of the Senussiyeh is a man of altogether exceptional ability. Under his direction the order has advanced with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable organiser and administrator, two qualities rarely found among the Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the Khalifa, and the more recent dethronement of Abdul-Hamid, resulted in bringing a large accession of force to his standard by the extinction of all religious authority Those who are in a position to know whereof they speak believe that the Senussiyeh would actively oppose any attempt on the part of the Italians to occupy the hinterland of Tripolitania, for it is obvious that such an occupation would not alone bring the Christian in dangerous proximity to the chief stronghold of the order, but it would effectually cut off the supplies of arms and ammunition which caravans in the pay of the Senussiyeh have regularly been transporting to Jof from obscure ports on the Tripolitanian coast. It has been the policy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish administration in Tripolitania, to close the regions under its control to Christians, so it is scarcely likely that it would do other than resist an Italian penetration of the country, even in the face of a Turkish Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with which sensational writers and superficial travellers have invested the subject, it is apparent that the Senussi controls a very wide-spread and powerful organisation—an organisation probably unique in the world. As a fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hardy racing-camel known as hegin, and their marvellous knowledge of this great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that they can always retreat to their bases in the desert, where civilised troops cannot follow them, are all advantages of which the Senussi and his followers are thoroughly aware. Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply From the glimpses which I have given you of the inhospitable character of Tripolitania and the still more inhospitable people who inhabit it, it will be seen that Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the Turk. She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started it upon a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as accessible from the mother country as Libya First and foremost, she must pick the men who are to settle her new colony as carefully as she picks the men Secondly, she must impress on these colonists the imperative necessity of keeping on friendly terms with the natives, who are, after all, the real owners of the soil, and of obtaining their co-operation in the development of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the negro, cannot be bullied and domineered with impunity, Germany's African colonies providing significant examples of the failures which invariably result from ill-treatment of the native population. Thirdly, there must be no “absentee landlordism,” the future of the colony largely depending, to my way of thinking, upon frugal, hard-working peasant farmers, owning their own farms, whose prosperity will thus be indissolubly linked with that of the colony. Lastly, all local questions of administration should be taken entirely out of the hands of Rome and left to “the man on the spot,” for history is filled with the chronicles of promising colonies which have been ship-wrecked on the rocks of a highly centralised form of government. If the Italians will take these things to heart, I believe that their conquest of Tripolitania will prove, in the end, for the country's own best good, contributing to its peace and to the welfare of its inhabitants, native as well as foreign, and that it will promote the opening |