The Tunisians, the common people of Tunis, are protégés of France, and France is doing her best to protect them and lead them to prosperity, assisted of course by the good-will and influence of the ruling Bey, whom she keeps in luxury and quasi-power.
Formerly when the native ruler did not care to be bothered with any particular class of subjects, whether they were Turks or Jews, he banished them, but the French officials consider this a superfluous prodigality, and keep all ranks at home and as contented as possible in their work of developing their country.
The one thing that the French will not have is a wholesale immigration of the Arab population of either Algeria or Tunisia. To benefit by a change of air, the indigène of whatever rank must have a special permission from the government before he will be allowed to embark on board ship, or he will have to become a stowaway. Very many get this special permission, for one reason or another, but to many it is refused, and for good and sufficient reasons. To the merchant who would develop a commerce in the wheat of the plateau-lands, the barley of the Sahel, or the dates of the oasis, permission is granted readily enough; and to the young student who would study law or medicine at Aix, Montpellier or Paris; but not to the able-bodied cultivator of the fields. He is wanted at home to grow up with the country.
Tunis la ville and Tunisia le pays are more mediæval and more Oriental than Algiers or Algeria. In Tunis, as in every Arab town, as in Constantinople or Cairo, you may yet walk the streets feeling all the oppression of that silence which “follows you still,” and of a patient, lack-lustre stare, still regarding you as “an unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, that may have been sent for some good purpose – to be revealed hereafter.”
The morality and the methods of the traders of the bazars and souks remain as Kinglake and Burton described them in their day, something not yet understood by the ordinary Occidental.
This sort of thing is at its best at Tunis. Wine, olives, dates and phosphates are each contributing to the prosperity of Tunis to a remarkable degree, and the development of each industry is increasing as nowhere else, not even in Algeria. In 1900 the vineyards of Tunisia increased over two thousand hectares, and in all numbered nearly twelve thousand hectares, of which one-quarter at least were native owned.
The wine crop in 1900 was 225,000 hectolitres, an increase of nearly thirty per cent, over the season before, and it is still increasing. The olive brings an enormous profit to its exploiters, and the Tunisian olive and Tunisian olive oil rank high in the markets of the world. Originally ancient Lybia was one of the first countries known to produce olive oil on a commercial scale. All varieties of olive are grown on Tunisian soil. The illustration herewith marks the species.
The art of making olive oil goes back to the god Mercury. In the time of Moses and of Job the culture of the olive was greatly in repute. The exotics of the East and of Greece took the olive-leaf for a symbol, but the fighting, quarrelsome Romans would have none of it; the bay leaf and the palm of victory were all-sufficient for them.
They soon came to know its value, however, when they overran North Africa, and they exploited the olive-groves as they did the plateau wheat belt. Cæsar even nourished his armies on such other local products as figs and dates and found them strength-giving and sinew-making. North Africa has ever been a garde-manger of nations.
What Tunisia needs is capital, and everybody knows it. The date-palm and the olive give the greatest return of all the agricultural exploitations of the country, and after them the vine, and finally the orange-tree, the lemon-tree, the fig and the almond. Each and every one of these fruits requires a different condition of soil and climate. Fortunately all are here, and that is why Tunisia is going some day to be a gold mine for all who invest their capital in the exploitation of its soil.
The date requires a warmth and dryness of atmosphere which is found nowhere so suitable as in the Djerid and the Nefzaoua in the south. Here the soil is of just the right sandy composition, and rain is comparatively unknown. For this reason the date here flourishes better than the olive, which accommodates itself readily to the Sahel and the mountains of the north. Of the vast production of dates in this region, by far the greater part is consumed at home, the exportation of a million francs’ worth per annum being but a small proportion of the whole.
Almost every newly exploited tourist ground has an individual brand of pottery which collectors rave over, though it may be the ordinary variety of cooking utensils which are common to the region. This is true of Tunis and the potteries of Nabeul.
Besides mere utilitarian articles for domestic use, the shapes and forms which these Arab pottery-workers give to their vases and jugs make them really characteristic and beautiful objets d’art; and they are not expensive. The loving marks of the potter’s thumb are over all, and his crude ideas of form and colour are something which more highly trained craftsmen often miss when they come to manufacturing “art-pottery,” as the name is known to collectors.
A cruchon decorated with a band of angular camels and queer zigzag rows of green or red has more of that quality called “character” than the finest lustre of the Golfe de Jouan or the faïence of Rouen. For five francs one may buy three very imposing examples of jugs, vases or water-bottles, and make his friends at home as happy as if he brought them a string of coral (made of celluloid, which is mostly what one gets in Italy to-day), or a carved ivory elephant of the Indies (made in Belgium of zylonite). The real art sense often expresses itself in the common, ordinary products of a country, though not every tourist seems to know this. Let the collector who wants a new fad collect “peasant pottery,” and never pay over half a dollar for any one piece.
Closely allied with the pottery of Nabeul is a more commercially grand enterprise which has recently been undertaken in the Sahel south of Tunis. Not all the wealth of the vastly productive though undeveloped countryside lies in cereals, phosphates or olive-trees. There is a species of clay which is suitable, apparently, to all forms of ceramic fabrication.
In one of the most picturesque corners of the littoral, just south of Monastir, is a factory which turns out the most beautiful glazed brick and tiles that one ever cast his eye upon. The red-tiled roof of convention may now be expected to give way to one of iridescent, dazzling green, if the industry goes on prospering; and no more will the brick-yards of Marseilles sell their dull, conventional product throughout Tunisia; and no more will the steamship companies grow wealthy off this dead-weight freight. The Italian or Maltese balancelle will deliver these magnificent coloured bricks and tiles of Monastir all over the Mediterranean shores; and a variety of colour will come into the landscape of the fishermen’s huts and the farmhouses which the artists of a former generation knew not of.
Tunis is undergoing a great commercial development, and if the gold of Ophir is not some day found beneath its soil, many who have predicted its undeveloped riches will be surprised and disappointed.
The railways of Tunisia are not at all adequate to the needs of the country, but they are growing rapidly. When the line is finally built linking Sousse and Sfax (the service is now performed by automobile by travellers, or on camel-back; or by Italian or Arab barques by water, for merchandise), there will be approximately 1,700 kilometres of single-track road. Algeria with an area four times as great has but 3,100 kilometres of railway.
The railway exploitation of Tunisia has not as yet brought any great profit to its founders. The net profit after the cost of exploitation, in 1904, was but half a million francs; but it has a bright future.
Great efforts are being made by the government authorities, and the railway officials as well, towards colonizing the Régence with French citizens. A million and a half of francs have already been spent by the government, in addition to free grants of land, towards this colonization, and in 1904 alone land to the value of a million and a half was sold to French immigrants.
If one wants to travel into the interior of Tunisia, off the beaten track, say to Médenine, beyond Gabès; or to Tozeur, he should find some way of fitting himself out with an authorization and recommendation from the French “civil control.” This recommendation will be written in Arabic, and one