Rome’s successors—The Road and its influence—Algerian highways—The motor-car and modern travel—An aqueduct—Cherchel—Cleopatra’s daughter—Tipasa—The French as Colonists—Viticulture.
“Among the ruins of old Rome, the grandeur of the
Commonwealth shews itself chiefly in temples, highways,
aqueducts, walls and bridges.”—Addison.
From many points of view the modern French may be regarded as representing most fully among the peoples of Europe the Romans of the Empire. The sturdy physique and unrivalled endurance, the unsurpassed gallantry and devotion to duty of their soldiers, recall the qualities of the legions. Their absorbing pride in and love for their native land is an echo of the tremendous sentiment of Roman citizenship. The logical coherence of their legal system is frankly based on the jurisprudence of Rome. Their faculty, for producing the most perfect work in the more refined forms of engineering and the manufacture of delicate tools and machines is a natural development of Roman thoroughness in constructive matters. And like the Romans they are the slaves of convention. Everything Roman was according to a settled plan. The empire was a vast aggregation of cities which aspired to be little Romes. From the borders of Scotland to the fringe of the Sahara, from Portugal to Asia Minor, cities were raised more or less, as circumstances permitted, fulfilling the conventional design; conventional not only in town-planning, and in the scheme of public buildings, but in the architecture of private houses and the most minute details of decoration. We grow weary in the museums of to-day of the repetition of the same motives in sculpture, in mosaic and in bronze-work. The only variety is in the quality of the execution. So, too, must a French town, a French house, a Frenchman’s manners and a Frenchwoman’s clothes be in accordance with a sealed pattern deposited in the temple of the great goddess Comme-il-faut. The French are the most law-abiding of nations, but their laws are les convenances. The occasional licence exhibited in their art and literature and morals is but the effort of a few eccentric individuals, not always of unmixed French breeding, to break through the trammels in which the mass of the race is bound.
In this country the French have set themselves from the first to carry on the Roman tradition in the making of roads. In a land which for twelve centuries has known little but destruction and decay they have built, as the Romans built before them, solid, uncompromising, inevitable highways, roads on which armies may march secure of ambush, and almost regardless of the hostility of natural forces;—roads which create not only peace, but prosperity in their course. The road is one of the most effective as it is one of the most permanent works of man. In England quite a large proportion of our main roads still follows the lines laid down by the Romans. We are ourselves rather road-menders than road-makers. Our genius finds its work in other directions. We have been in South Africa far longer than the French in North Africa, and what have we to show there at all comparable with the Algerian roads?
In one of the most notable books of our generation, Mr. Hilaire Belloc has set before us the uses, the influence, the interest, and the fascination of the road. In the course of an exploration of one of those ancient highways which we English have permitted to fall into decay and in part to disappear, he has taken occasion to impress on us the part which the road has played in the spread of civilizing influences. Algeria—roadless and anarchical for centuries, orderly and webbed with roads to-day—may add point to his argument. “More than rivers and more than mountain chains, roads have moulded the political groupings of men. The Alps with a mule-track across them are less of a barrier than fifteen miles of forest or rough land separating one from that track. Religions, which are the principal formers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to city and leaving the ‘Pagani,’ in the villages off the road, to a later influence. Consider the series, Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens and the Appian Way; Rome, all the tradition of the Ligurian Coast, Marseilles and Lyons. I have read in some man’s book that the last link of that chain was the river Rhone; but this man can never have tried to pull a boat upon the Rhone upstream. It was the Road that laid the train. The Mass reached Lyons before, perhaps, the last disciple of the apostles was dead; in the Forez, just above, four hundred years later, there were most probably offerings at night to the pagan gods of those sombre and neglected hills. And with religions all that is built on them: letters, customs, community of language and idea, have followed the Road, because humanity, which is the matter of religion, must also follow the road it has made. Architecture follows it, commerce of course, all information; it is even so with the poor thin philosophies, each in its little day drifts, for choice, down a road.”[[2]]
[2]. “The Old Road,” 1904, p. 5.
The making of the Algerian highways has been no light matter. They have frequently demanded much engineering skill. Their repair is a difficult and expensive business, the heavy winter rains and the fierce summer sun have a rapidly disintegrating effect on the friable materials available. Algeria is not only an exceedingly mountainous country, but its physical conditions are very peculiar, and, except by those who have explored them, not as a rule very fully understood. The common idea of a fertile belt, more or less hilly and of varying width, between the sea on the north and the Sahara on the south, is imperfect and incorrect. As a very rough generalization, subject to innumerable variations of mountain and valley and plain, Algeria may be said to consist of two parallel ranges of mountains running north-east and south-west. The northern range slopes very gradually to the sea, often in a series of plains, providing with its copious rainfall that fertile tract known as the Tell, once the granary of Rome, and now again developing a great export trade. The Tell itself contains numerous ranges of lesser hills, called Sahels. The southern range faces the desert, in the east, in the great rocky mass of the Aures, with steep cliffs; in the west less abruptly. Between the two ranges is contained a lofty plateau, of convex form, in the main barren and sandy, but covered here and there with scrub. In many of its features it imitates the true desert. It has its shallow depressions filled with brackish water; and its inhabitants dwell in rare oases where fresh water occurs. The mountains attain no great elevation, their summits seldom exceeding 6000 feet. This is a pity. A lofty range treasuring copious stores of eternal snow would perhaps have made of the high plateau a veritable garden; and its influence would have been felt far southwards into the Sahara. The direction of the mountain lines causes the Tell, the land of tilth and colonization, to be wide at the western end of the Colony, in the province of Oran, and narrow at the eastern end, in the province of Constantine.