NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE sound of arms has drawn closer to us, echoing from French Africa and from Italy.
Abd-el-Kader has reappeared; and so formidable has been the rising of the Moorish Arabs against the French soldiery, that France is driven to new efforts as if for a fresh war on a grander scale. The unconquerable chief is understood to haive sworn, years ago, that he would never cease to resist the French in- vaders • and thus far he has kept his word. Last year his power seemed destroyed : he had been routed, and had narrowly escaped personal captivity ; his half-ally, the Emperor of Morocco, was forced to outlaw him ; the fugitive found an asylum where he could, among tribes too remote and poor to have been brought under strict subjection to any government ; and he appeared to have become that most contemptible of persons the pretender to a power departed. The Native tribes occasionally manifested some contumacy, but Abd-el-Kader was only heard. of as wanderinc, about ill search of a precarious refuge. The colony looked quieter than it had ever been. Where blood was shed, it was merely in retail by a few lawless assassins; or if wholesale, it was by the victorious French, as in the grottoes of Dahra. The quiet grew positively dull ; and Marshal Bugeaud—somewhat hindered in his sport among the wild Arabs, whom he baited like earthed badgers or slaughtered like the deer at Gotha—came to France to vary the pleasures of the man-chase with a taste of political in- trigue. The Journal des Debats exulted in the submissive silence of the Algerines, and contrasted the unchecked triumph of French arms with the repulse of Prince Woronzoff's army in the Cau- casus. Presently a stir is heard among the Flittas, and General Bourjolly is sent to see what is the matter ; and there is a little murmuring in the Tlemcen, on the Western frontier, and Colonel Cavaignac sets out with a strong force. Public feeling is out- raged, for the Flittas send General Bon/jolly back with terrible loss; but how bitter the indignation at the news from the Tlem- cen !—a body of four hundred men, under Colonel Montagnac, had been drawn into an ambush, and only fourteen returned alive: Abd-el-Kader had destroyed the rest. In France itself, mortification takes the shape of sanguinary rage, and something must be done to retrieve the military fame of the nation : the terribleMarshal Bugeaud is to be sent back without delay ; a reinforcement, or rather a new army of twelve thousand men, is to be transported to the colony ; and in virtue of the treaty with the Emperor Abd-er-Rahman Abd-el-Kader is to be hunted down until he be overtaken and seized, even though that be within the territory of Morocco. From these formidable preparatives, an Opposition paper, Le National, infers that some very extensive danger menaces the rule of France in a colony already occupied by an army of eighty thousand men; but no wider inference needs be drawn, than the necessity felt by the Government, of grasping the master-spirit of Arab turbulence, and restoring the tarnished prestige of the French arms, at what- ever cost. There is a kind of consistency in such a conclusion. Perhaps a real colonization of Algeria might be a more economi- cal way of assimilating it to the French empire ; whereas France has not six thousand colonists in the whole territory, exclusively of the soldiers. But if the province is to be held solely by the tenure of military occupation of course the military power must be rendered supreme, cost what it may; and it would be unwise to halt at measures less decisive than those imputed to the Government. The question remains to be elucidated by the event, how far the plan of retaliation is likely to involve France in a war with Morocco and in differences with the allies of Abd-er-Rahman.
