THE ARAB CHRISTIAN VILLAGES IN ALGERIA.
BY LADY HERBERT.
Many visitors to Algeria have doubtless heard of the wonderful exertions of the archbishop of that country, Mgr. Lavigerie, whereby thousands of Arab children were saved, both body and soul, after the fearful famine of 1868. But few people in England are aware of the existence of the Arab Christian villages, which form, as it were, the completion of his great and really superhuman work, so that a slight sketch of their origin and establishment may not be without interest to our readers.
It is needless to go back in detail to the horrors of that famine year. No one who had not witnessed them could ever believe the heart-breaking scenes which met one at every turn — men reduced to perfect skeletons, eating grass like the beasts of the field, women sinking by the roadside, with starving babies at their breasts, young children, gaunt with famine, with faces like old men, their bones starting through their skin, vainly striving to keep up with their parents, and dropping by dozens on the way. Such were the hourly sights of that terrible winter. But whereas with the Mussulmans and their fatalist doctrines, scarcely barren pity was elicited for the sufferers, Catholic charity was roused to an heroic pitch of devotion. Priests, with the holy archbishop at their head, sisters of charity of every order, ladies, doctors, soldiers — all put their shoulders to the wheel, and braving death (for typhus had, as usual, followed in the train of the famine), multiplied themselves to meet the terrible crisis, and save this starving multitude. But in spite of all their efforts, thousands of Arabs died, leaving their children on the archbishop's hands. What was to be done with them? In a beautiful letter, addressed by Mgr. Lavigerie to the French and Belgian Catholics, we find the answer to this query in his own simple words, "God inspired me to become their father." Upwards of two thousand boys and girls were received at first in his own episcopal palace; then brothers and sisters of charity offered their services, which were accepted, and large agricultural schools were opened, in which both sexes were trained to every kind of industrial and out-of-door work, with a result which has amazed all those who have visited these establishments. But the archbishop was not content with educating and bringing up these children. He determined to devise a scheme, whereby their future would be secured from the danger of returning to their tribes or becoming depraved by contact with the bad colonists who, unhappily, abound in Algeria, which, for a long while, was looked upon almost as a penal settlement.
We will give his plan in his own words: —-
- I have bought land to create by-and-by Arab Christian villages, just as the State has done in Algeria for Spaniards, Swiss, and Italians. We shall form families by uniting our young men and women, giving them each the quantity of land necessary for their maintenance and that of their children, and of these groups of twenty, thirty, and forty young couples, we shall create villages under our own superintendence, and, I trust, with the approval and encouragement of the State. For it will be an easy and certain method of forming in the heart of Algeria a native Christian population, and assimilating to ourselves races which hitherto we have subdued only by force of arms, without inducing them to conform to our faith or habits, and whom we have the sorrow of seeing rapidly deteriorating, and even disappearing before the influx of their Christian conquerors.
He adds with touching earnestness: —
- When I think over these plans, in the evening, in my solitude of St. Eugene, and that gazing into the depths of their glorious African sky, I beseech of God the time and the grace to complete the work I have begun. I often dream of my tomb being placed in one of those peaceful villages, surrounded by my adopted children. It seems to me that my last sleep will be sweeter among those who are really my sons in tenderness and gratitude. I feel as if these souls, for whom I have sacrificed all, and whom my ministry will have regenerated, will plead better than others before the throne of God for mercy for the sins of my past life.
This glorious project, which in 1870 was only the dream and prayer of the holy and devoted archbishop, has now been realized, and that with a success beyond all human expectation. Let us once more quote Mgr. Lavigerie's words, written four years later: —
- In one of the Algerian valleys, between two chains of mountains, of which one, stretching towards the sea, forms the little Kabylia of Cherchell, and the other, rising in an amphi-theatre, leads to the high levels of the Sahara, one perceives, during the last few months, from the railroad, which is now opened between Oran and Algiers, a little village perched on the lowest spurs of the mountains. A bright stream, the Cheliff, flows at its feet; another little river bounds it to the right. This village is on the site of an old Roman colony, which
