’Il y a tout un cote, particulierement curieux, de l’Algerie, qui vous a echappe parce que vous n’avez pu ou voulu vous imposer l’ennui de causer souvent avec les colons, et que ce cote-la ne se voit pas en parlant avec les gouvernants; c’est l’abus de la centralisation.  L’Afrique peut etre consideree comme le tableau le plus complet et le plus extraordinaire des vices de ce systeme.

’Je suis convaincu que seul, sans les Arabes, le soleil, le desert, et la fievre, il suffirait pour nous empecher de coloniser.  Tout ce que la centralisation laisse entrevoir de defauts, de ridicules et absurdites, d’oppression, de paperasseries en France, est grossi en Afrique au centuple.  C’est comme un pou vu dans un microscope.’

‘J’ai cause,’ I answered, ’avec Vialar et avec mon hote aux eaux ferrugineuses.  Mais ils ne se sont pas plaints de la centralisation.’

‘Ils ne se sont pas plaints,’ he answered, ’du mot que, peut-etre, ils ne connaissaient pas.  Mais si vous les aviez fait entrer dans les details de l’administration publique, ou meme de leurs affaires privees, vous auriez vu que le colon est plus gene dans tous ses mouvements, et plus gouverne pour son plus grand bien que vous ne l’avez ete quand il s’est agi de votre passeport.

’Violar faisait allusion a cela quand il vous a dit que les chemins manquaient parce que le Gouvernement ne voulait pas laisser les gouvernes s’en meler.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  ’One whole side, and that a very curious one, of Algeria, has escaped you, because you could not, or would not, inflict on yourself the bore of talking frequently with the colonists, and this side cannot be seen in conversing with officials—­it is the abuse of centralisation.  Africa may be considered as the most complete and most extraordinary picture of the vices of this system.  I am convinced that it alone, without the Arabs, the sun, the desert and the fever, would be enough to prevent us from colonising.  All the defects of centralisation, its oppressions, its faults, its absurdities, its endless documents, which are dimly perceived in France, become one hundred times bigger in Africa.  It is like a louse in a microscope.’

‘I conversed,’ I answered, ’with Violar and with my landlord at the mineral waters, and they did not complain of centralisation.’  ’They did not complain,’ he answered, ’of the word, which perhaps is unknown to them.  But if you had made them enter into the details of the public administration, or even of their own private affairs, you would have seen that the colonist is more confined in all his movements, and more governed, for his good, than you were with regard to your passport.

’This is what Violar meant when he told you that roads were wanting, because the Government would not permit its subjects to interfere in making them.’]

Monday, May 28.—­Tocqueville called on me.

I asked him for criticisms on my article on the State of the Continent in the ‘North British Review’ of February 1855.[1]