Comprehensive books on Algeria of to-day are few, and usually contradict one another, according to the point of view of the writers.

The only solution, therefore, to the problem of writing this book has been for the author to settle in the country, living the life of its people, and gleaning what information was possible as a business man in the city of Algiers, as a sheep-breeder on the Sahara, and as a traveler across the great plains and mountains of this sunny land.

The title of the book has perhaps a pretentious sound, suggesting that Algeria is some unexplored country into which the writer has penetrated, bringing back with him revelations of unknown mysteries never yet set before the public. But though this is not the case, it is hoped that the reader, be he a tourist or scholar, will find in these pages information which is new and interesting—Algeria from Within in opposition to the Algeria from “without” as set down by travelers who have passed a few winter months in the country and who, returning home, have compiled an inaccurate volume based on first impressions and on legends served up very hot by the hard-worked guides.

These legends will have to be dispelled at the cost of disillusioning veteran visitors who pass winter after winter in the overheated hotels of Mustapha Supérieur. But, against this, the book will endeavor to explain shortly and accurately what this French colony really is, what its people are doing and thinking, wherein lies its future.

There have been no aspirations to make of it a comprehensive guide-book or survey of the country’s long history, neither has any attempt been made to criticize the French rule, or to compare it with the administration of other colonies. True facts have been set down as seen by one who has lived many years in the country, constantly studying all about him without confining himself to one area nor to one class of people. Living not only in the big cities, but also in the cultivated plains, in the desolation of the desert, and mixing with the French administrators, with business men, with the colonists, and visiting the Arabs in such intimacy that it is possible to tell of their daily life as it is really lived.

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It is more a pen-picture of Algeria and the Sahara as it is to-day, drawn in the desire that the reader— be he traveler in all the senses of the word or one who journeys by his fireside on long winter evenings— will close the volume with a feeling that he has peeped for a moment into the intimate life of a country which, with all its youthful future, has a background of history more varied perhaps than any other country in the world. . . .

To the average tourist who leaves the misty London station in search of warmth and sunshine, the country he is about to visit is probably a somewhat uncertain vision of blue skies, palm-trees, and stately Arabs.

The inspired artists of the P. L. M. railway posters have dazzled his eyes with enchanting prospects of palm-green shores and rolling expanses of sand, golden in a perpetual sunset, while the scaleless maps of tourist agencies have graven in his mind the names Algiers, Biskra, Fez and Tunis, leaving him with a vague impression that all these places are in the same country and within easy reach of one another.