Algeria: A Case Study in the Evolution of a Colonial Problem

Since Tunisia and Morocco have attained their independence, Algeria is the only part of the once imposing French Empire in North Africa over which France still exercises sovereign control. It is also the last sizeable territorial foothold which any European power possesses on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Algeria is important to France not only because of its colon population and its implications for the prestige of French culture, but also because it is still the gateway to France’s possessions in Equatorial Africa. It is important to the NATO community because Western Europe, shorn of its defense in depth on the southern flank, would lose its commanding strategic position in the Mediterranean. It is not surprising, therefore, that Algeria should be specifically included in the NATO area, as defined by the Treaty itself.

The French have always looked upon Algeria as different from Morocco and Tunisia. French interests in Tunisia and Morocco date only from 1881 and 1911, respectively. Since the Treaty of Bardo in 1881 for Tunisia and the Treaty of Fez in 1912 for Morocco, these two countries had been governed as protectorates. As such, they were essentially foreign to France. Their external relations, defense, and trade policies were regulated by the Foreign Office in Paris, but their internal social structures remained basically Moslem. Algeria, on the other hand, settled as early as 1830, has been regarded since 1848 as a part of metropolitan France. Since it is an integral part of the national territory, its twelve departments are under the French Minister of the Interior. Furthermore, France has deliberately fostered colonial settlement in Algeria, whereas she did not adopt this as a policy toward the protectorates. Today, there are about one million colons in Algeria, most of whom are of French extraction, compared with a population of approximately eight million Moslems. During the days of the Third Republic, Algeria began to send ten deputies to the French Parliament. In the Fourth Republic, this number was increased to thirty. The Organic Statute for Algeria of 1947 established two electoral colleges, one for the European community and one for the Moslems. Each college was to elect half of the Algerian delegation to Paris, as well as one of the houses of the Assemblée Algerienne. The French hoped that this representative system would symbolize the fact that all Algerians were French citizens. But the actual inequality of the Moslems and colons persists despite the equality which all inhabitants of French soil are supposed to share under the Constitution of the Fourth Republic.

When the French crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa in 1830, they were confronted, not with a nation, but with a nest of pirates. Algeria had no boundaries, no history, no juridically organized population, and no name. The French brought with them law and administrative order, investment, schools, and European-style towns and villages along the coast, where the most fertile strip of soil is located. They also brought with them the notion that French citizenship could be extended to the people of Algeria. One of the primary reasons why the French deemed this possible was that the Algerian nationality was not a historical reality. It has been a fundamental theme of French colonial policy that French citizenship is a privilege. At one time, the bestowal of this privilege was conditional upon the espousal of Christianity. But since the French Revolution, the French have generally adhered to the more liberal policy of granting citizenship without such religious qualifications. As Bertrand de Jouvenel has put it:

In a Frenchman’s eyes there exists no more desirable status than that of Frenchman; he understands that one should desire to become a Frenchman, and indeed French nationality has been sought by large numbers of foreigners; he does not understand that one could wish to turn from French nationality to any other, and this indeed has been a scarce phenomenon. . . .

So far as the French aspirations of effecting a great cultural synthesis in Algeria were concerned, however, la mission civilisatrice did not succeed. Most of the tribal groups have resisted cultural assimilation during the last century and a quarter. Outside the Europeanized settlements, the people have clung to their Berber or Arabic ways and language. In reality, two nations have grown side by side. The French brought their own national consciousness with them, and this consciousness was modified as an increasing percentage of the colon population became native to Algeria. Meanwhile, the Moslems who were educated by the French began to imbibe French political and legal ideas and gradually developed a sense of nationality which they had never known before.

To understand the problem of the two Algerian nationalities, it is necessary to review the citizenship policy of France in Algeria during the nineteenth century. The French believed that a man could be a French national and still remain attached to Islamic faith, laws, and customs. What is more, a Moslem could become a French citizen after 1865 if he renounced the Koranic Law and subscribed to the French Civil Code. This seems to indicate that the French, who were used to distinguishing the civil from the religious order, thought that the educated Moslem might do the same. They failed to understand the full significance of the Koranic Law, since the rejection of it entailed the disintegration of the Islamic religious and social structure. The Moslem, in effect, had to whittle away at the roots of his faith in order to become a French citizen. Therefore, so far as citizenship was concerned, the policy in North Africa was for all practical purposes less liberal than that applied to the colonies held by France at the time of the Revolution, such as Guadaloupe and Martinique. The presence of the Moslem religion and Arab culture in North Africa made the policy necessarily less liberal.

In 1930, on the hundredth anniversary of the French settlement in Algeria, the French Government began considering how to acknowledge the loyalty of the Moslem population by extending the franchise to the Moslems without requiring them to renounce their religion. At that time, Algeria was already sending to the Parliament in Paris, ten deputies who were elected by a quarter of a million Europeans and about 2,000 Moslems. The reason why so few Moslems participated in the franchise was that, despite the growing secularism in the Islamic world, most of the Arabs and Berbers refused to go through the formal renunciation of the Koranic law and acceptance of French citizenship. The Blum-Viollette Bill of 1936 proposed in effect to substitute high educational qualifications for the renunciation of Moslem law. The high educational qualifications for voting privileges, of course, implied some assimilation of French culture on the part of the Moslems. An estimated 30,000 Moslems would have been eligible to be incorporated into the electorate. As one specialist in the field has remarked, the colons saw in the Blum-Viollette Bill “a thin edge of a wedge whose other end was of incalculable dimensions, and they therefore opposed it bitterly.” The Moslem leaders regarded it similarly, and for that reason supported it. They could see that French policy in the Algerian departments would gradually produce more schools and an increased number of French-educated natives who would qualify in the unified constituencies. Thus, under the Blum-Viollette plan, even though Algeria as a whole was under-represented in the French Parliament, the European and native communities in Algeria would have been integrated for political purposes on the basis of a common French language and education. But the violent response of the colons reverberated in France and led Premier Blum to withdraw the bill before it came to a vote. According to Herbert Luethy:

This was neither the first nor the last time that a solemnly announced French project of assimilation was quietly interred. There had been more than a score of similar cases since 1865. But this was the first and the last time that such a project aroused a profound response among the Moslems of Algeria. This time their disillusionment was final. Those against whom the door was slammed could no longer fail to develop a consciousness of being Algerian, precisely because they were excluded from the French community.

World War II provided the French with a pretext for stifling the mounting Moslem resentment. Moslem leaders were imprisoned, political parties suppressed, and newspapers censored. When the Allied forces landed in North Africa in November, 1942, they were presented with the Manifesto of the Algerian People which declared, among other things, that “it is just and human that an Algerian Moslem should be, at least, a citizen in his own country.” An Algerian Moslem could not be a citizen of France unless he abjured his religious faith; and he could not be a citizen of Algeria because it had no citizenship of its own. The Manifesto, in general, was a moderate document. It was sponsored by Ferhat Abbas, who himself had thought as late as 1936 that there was no such thing as an Algerian nationality.^[1] Abbas’ mentality was for the most part a product of French culture: to this day he does not speak good classical Arabic. Despite his pro-French leanings during the war, Abbas became convinced that further development of Algeria as an integral part of metropolitan France was not feasible. Founding the Union Democratiqne du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA) in 1943, Abbas started to work for a system of internal autonomy for an Algeria that would remain in the post-war French Union as a semi-autonomous territory with the foreign affairs and defense powers reserved to metropolitan France. This plan, if adopted, would have given Algeria a considerable measure of local independence, since military and external affairs were not of overriding importance in Algerian politics at that time. Messali Hadj, formerly a member of the Algerian Communist Party, had founded, during the inter-war period, an anti-French Party which demanded unconditional independence and which, after 1946, was known as the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertiés Democratiques (MTLD).

Although the French had been able to temporize on the Algerian question up to and even through the period of the war, they had to produce a fairly permanent solution to the problem when the time came for writing the Constitution of the Fourth Republic. During the debates on the colonies in 1946, Maurice Viollette, referring to the assimilation project which he had sponsored in the mid-thirties, struck a wistful note:

I believed that it would be possible by successive great surges through the lock-gates to integrate into the French unity the whole of the population . . . and that France would thus become the greatest Mohammedan Power in the world. It was a great dream that I nourished. . . .

Although the new constitution bestowed French citizenship on all the inhabitants of the French Union territories, the Organic Statute for Algeria in 1947 rejected the principle of assimilation insofar as it estabished two separate electoral colleges for selecting the Algerian delegation to the Parliament in Paris. Since the European and the Moslem colleges were each to elect fifteen deputies, this meant that the colons were being represented in the same proportion as the constituents of the Department of the Seine, for example, while the Moslem population received only a minimal, symbolic representation.[2] By treating the colons and the Moslems separately for electoral purposes, France in effect recognized the existence of two distinct nations in the Algerian Departments. In the last decade, both the colons and the Moslems have looked upon themselves as Algerians and as the rightful masters of the country.

If the French hope to retain Algeria as an integral part of France, it will be necessary for them to answer two important questions. First, are they prepared to accept all the future political implications of a policy of complete assimilation? Second, can internal unity be achieved within Algeria itself? The dual problem is reflected in the electoral arrangement which prevailed after 1947. According to the strict principle of proportion which complete assimilation would demand, the size of the Algerian delegation permitted under the Organic Statute (thirty deputies) would have to be increased at least four times. That the French are not yet ready to take such a step is obvious from the fact that they themselves cannot help looking upon the Algerian deputies as outsiders. These deputies, when they tried to speak for the interests of Algeria as distinct from those of France, were reminded that they were Frenchmen, but when they entered into debate on French domestic issues they were often told that they should mind their own business. Given the precarious margins on which cabinet coalitions in Paris usually operate, the French are afraid to increase the Algerian delegation in the Parliament, lest it come to hold the legislative balance of power. Furthermore, carried to its logical conclusion throughout the entire French Union, the policy of assimilation, as Maurice Duverger has remarked, would result in giving a majority in the French Parliament to the overseas deputies; the mother country has only forty-three million inhabitants as against more than fifty million in the territories. This would have been acceptable only if the fifty million ex-colonial natives had been culturally assimilated, and had thought as a man from Auvergne or Provence would.[3]

Inside Algeria itself, the problem of achieving unity is a formidable one, in view of the mounting tension between an “Arabized” Algerian nationalism and the colons, who in many respects are the most conservative “Frenchmen” in the world. Although neither the Left nor the Right in the French National Assembly has been willing to admit a distinction between the soil of France and the soil of Algeria, public opinion in metropolitan France has been much more amenable to a liberal policy toward Algeria than the colons have been.[4] The colons, of course, are extremely jealous of the privileged position which they now hold. Despite the long record of economic development as a result of French investment, [5] the Arabs and the Berbers resent their inferior position and fear that it will be made permanent if Algeria remains French. The French, it is true, have made Algeria the most highly developed area on the African continent outside of the Union of South Africa, but the economic superiority of the colons over the vast majority of the Moslem population is undeniable. The colons, for example, own three-quarters of the better grade of land and all but 500 out of a total of 17,000 tractors. The Moslems remain unimpressed by arguments that Algeria is making economic progress, since they are convinced that the effect of most of this progress is to raise the living standard of the European population to the luxury level and to widen further the gap between the two communities. But Moslem resentment on this score should not be characterized as violent. Inequality as regards property is not the most onerous form of inequality so far as the Moslem is concerned, nor do the Algerian nationalists place a great deal of emphasis on economic disparity in their anti-French literature.

Most of the Moslem complaints are directed at political and legal inequalities. Publications of the “Algerian Delegation” emanating from the Cairo headquarters of the National Liberation Front (FLN) single out the obvious inequality of the Algerian electoral scheme. The distinction between “Frenchmen” and “French Moslems” is frequently criticized. Some of the other typical objections concerning what the nationalists term racial discrimination run as follows:

Whereas Christian and Jewish worship is free in Algeria, Moslem worship is under the authority and the supervision of the French authorities. . . .

The system of racial differentiation is the basis of the political regime imposed upon the Algerians, and comprises practises which are destined to depersonalize them by cutting them off from their linguistic identity (Arabic) and their cultural heritage (Moslem civilization) by hampering Algerian efforts to spread the teaching of their language and the development of their culture.

The Moslem judicial system is totally subordinated to the European on the civil and penal level.

Moslem cases may be appealed before French courts, and Frenchmen serve on juries which judge criminal cases in which Moslems are involved, whereas the reverse does not hold.[6] Perhaps the educated Moslem resents most of all the fact that after a century and a quarter of efforts toward assimilation, nearly 95 per cent of the higher administrative posts in the government in Algeria are still held by persons of French extraction. Most of the Arabs who have received an advanced education in European universities have pursued literary and legal studies in preparation for public service careers, but upon returning to Algeria they have been confronted with a relative scarcity of opportunities in the government bureaus. This, says de Jouvenel, has proved to be a major factor in turning their minds toward political independence.

The problem of Algeria was essentially a political one, then, rather than an economic one, even prior to the outburst of terrorism in the fall of 1954. A political solution, devised in time, might conceivably have healed the breach between the two nations in Algeria and paved the way for the development of a unified consciousness that would have rendered it feasible to work out the social and economic difficulties gradually. There was a failure to solve the problem at a political level, however, when postwar Algerian nationalism was yet in an embryonic stage. No one can say for sure whether the failure may have been inevitable, given the difficulties facing the French Government. It felt, on the one hand, that it was impossible to extend to the Algerians a weightier role in the making of national policy. It felt, on the other hand, that it could not move toward political equalization in Algeria over the opposition of the colons. Cabinet instability in Paris and the lack of effective political control over the European communities in Algeria have proved to be two of the most formidable obstacles to an orderly and nonviolent resolution of the Algerian problem.

The French were logical to the point of conceding the right of Tunisian rebels to fight for the independence of their country because their country was not in and of France. But when the Algerian nationalists began to agitate for severing the ties with France, that was tantamount to secession, because the French look upon Algeria just as Americans would look upon Hawaii, if it should attain statehood. In the eyes of the French, the fighting between Algerian nationalist and the French Government forces is analogous to the fighting between the Confederates and the Union in the American Civil War and should not be regarded as colonial insurrection. The French were never fully aware of the explosive situation which their policies had created in Algeria, and hence they were caught by surprise when the fighting broke out in the Department of Constantine on the night of October 31, 1954. The coordinated nature of the initial attack, however, which was carried out at thirty different points, made it clear that the rebellion was the result of long and careful planning. From the outset of the conflict, the national liberation rebels have given it the character of a civil war, rather than merely an anti-French uprising, by attacking the Moslems who have accommodated themselves to the existing political and social structure of Algeria. These attacks have served graphically to warn the other Moslems that they had better resist the drift toward assimilation. They have also served to frighten the Moslem population to the point where it finds it advisable to furnish food, money, shelter, and intelligence to the rebels, whose success hangs upon such support. As Robert Barrat has observed: “When six miles of telegraph posts are cut down in a single night in the north Constantine sector, and twenty-five thousand vine stalks are pulled up by the roots in another district, an important segment of the village populations must also be involved.”

During the first few weeks of terrorist activity, the number of the rebels was estimated to be between a few hundred and three thousand. Their favorite tactic was to swoop out of nowhere into the towns, burn some buildings, and then open fire with light weapons. Before any action could be organized against them, they would disappear into the night, usually toward the Aurés Mountains near the Tunisian frontier. The French, just starting to relax after ending the seven-year-old war in Indochina, reacted quickly with sizeable forces. Within a few weeks, 45,000 troops had been dispatched to Algeria. Backed up by tanks and planes, mobile columns of infantry thrust their way into the mountains, only to find frequently that their elusive adversary had fallen back across the border to take refuge in the sovereign state of Tunisia. From time to time, Tunisian volunteers also crossed the border in the opposite direction to help the Algerian fellaghas.

The revolt is being masterminded by the National Liberation Front (FLN) which has established a Maghreb office in Cairo to give strategic and political direction to the insurgents. Forty-year-old Ahmed Ben Bella, a veteran nationalist leader, is generally conceded to be the predominant member of the FLN leadership. Until his capture in October, 1956, by the French, Ben Bella was a regular commuter between Cairo and Algeria.[7] The FLN has been in existence approximately two years, and according to some reports it has established de facto government over an estimated one-third of Algeria. It has reportedly set up its own local administration in many areas and is compelling the natives to boycott the French. While Tunisia and Morocco have remained officially neutral as far as direct intervention is concerned, they have given moral support to the nationalists, and groups of rebels have been crossing the Tunisian border to rest and to purchase arms and supplies. While neither Premier Bourguiba nor the Sultan are too enthusiastic about the Arab League and its role in the Algerian rebellion and both really wish to maintain close relations with France, it would be impossible for them to remain neutral in view of the strong pro-Algerian nationalist sentiment in their countries.

In late 1956, the number of rebels had risen to an estimated 20,000. To combat them, the French siphoned off more than 400,000 troops and a considerable amount of NATO equipment from Europe. From this fact it is evident that the problem of Algeria is no longer merely a colonial problem. It is now also a political and strategic problem involving the pan-Arabic ambitions of Egyptian President Nasser and the efforts of the Soviet Union to penetrate the Arab world and simultaneously to outflank and weaken the West. Without external sources of supply, the nationalists could not continue to expand beyond the limits set by their initial arms caches, hidden away since World War II, and by the meager rate at which they have been able to capture equipment from the French. Nasser and the Russian Communists have proved to be the most natural allies of the rebels.

The present status of Algeria within the French Union is the chief barrier to the creation of an Arab Belt stretching, in Nasser’s words, “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.” One of the methods employed by Egypt to win control of the Arab unity movement has been to champion all Arab revolts against Western political domination. Nasser’s influence in the Maghreb area—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—has been much weaker than in the Arab League area.[8]  If Nasser could gain control of Algeria by supporting a nationalist rebellion, he might be able to convert that state into a base for the infiltration of Tunisia and Morocco. The success of the Algerian revolt during its first two years was due in no small measure to the political and logistic support rendered by Egypt. Egypt has advanced the Algerians’ cause in the Arab League, the Bandung community, and the United Nations. Furthermore, she has supported the rebels not only with propaganda over the “Voice of the Arabs” but also by supplying a haven for the FLN leaders in Cairo, by training rebel officers and non-coms, and by furnishing most of the arms and ammunition.[9]

It became increasingly clear during 1956 that the Soviet Union has a stake in the Algerian conflict. Up to the time of the Hungarian patriotic uprising, Radio Budapest parroted Radio Cairo’s more extreme Arabic language propaganda against the French in North Africa. Apparently the Communists have built a small maquis inside the French Army, and there have been instances in which this maquis has delivered French arms to the Algerian rebels. The Algerian Communist party, after being dissolved by the Government, formed many of its 8,000 militants into groups designed to infiltrate the existing rebel bands and to promote terrorism in the cities. But the most important way in which the Soviet Union has aided the National Liberation Front has been by sending shiploads of Czech and Russian arms to Egypt, thereby releasing obsolete Egyptian equipment for use in Algeria. Jacques Soustelle, the former Governor-General of Algeria, has analyzed the Soviet Communist role in this way:

In view of the increasing influence of Soviet policy upon the Egyptian dictator one can say that the Algerian conflict is under communist control on two levels: through terrorist action at the base and through the shaping of strategy at the top. On both levels, the nationalists play their part in rousing pan-Arabic and pan-Islamic fanaticism. But there can be no doubt that the management is slipping from their hands and that the conflict they created is becoming plainly and simply an episode in the cold war.

Against the background of a gradually worsening situation, it is unfortunate that the sections of non-Communist public opinion in France, as well as the various parties in the National Assembly, still lack a clearly defined plan for solving the Algerian problem. As far as they are concerned, the problem can still be summed up in the phrase, “Algeria is French territory.” While the non-Communist parties have not elaborated any concrete plan, they seem to favor two general formulas, the one calling for assimilation, the other calling for autonomization. The long-range implications of a policy of assimilation have already been discussed, and they involve more concessions than the supporters of the assimilation formula are willing to make. It would mean that the National Assembly would have to seat 140 delegates from Algeria. According to the most generous estimates, if Algeria were divided into 140 equal districts, only seven could be counted upon to produce a European majority. While all the non-Communist parties accept the principle that Algeria is part of France, they disagree over the method of electing the deputies. The Moderates and the Right favor the maintenance of the existing two-college system, while the Left favors a single college such as the one proposed in the Blum- Viollette bill of 1936. There is also disagreement in regard to the procedure to be followed in installing a new constitutional regime in Algeria. The advocates of the so-called Soustelle Plan, which envisions free elections, insist upon bringing the rebellion completely to an end before even allowing negotiations to begin. The Left, on the other hand, wants negotiations with the nationalist leaders as early as possible in order to end the bloodshed.

Given the fact that the French policy of assimilation has failed, it now appears that the only solution which would keep Algeria in the French Union would be to grant Algeria some measure of autonomy, particularly for internal affairs. Such a settlement might follow the pattern set in the cases of Tunisia and Morocco, or it might leave Paris a greater voice in the spheres of foreign relations and defense than she has with respect to the other two North African states. The most serious obstacle to any policy of autonomy is posed by the presence of the European community in Algeria. The colons fear the loss of their dominant position under any system of “home rule.” They also fear that they would be reduced to a persecuted minority in the midst of the Moslems, who have learned the doctrine of legislative majoritarianism from the French. If autonomy comes, the colons would want the home country to protect them by the prior imposition of a partition. One proposal which commends itself to many colons has been called the “Ulsterization” of Algeria, i.e., the division of the country along the lines of the plan adopted for Ireland in 1922. Under this sort of partition, the coastal zone would be reserved for the colons, and this would remain an integral part of metropolitan France while the rest of Algeria would be granted autonomy. “Ulsterization,” by regrouping all the inhabitants of European extraction along the coast, would make it unnecessary for them to resort to gerrymandering to insure for themselves a position at least of equality, if not superiority, in the Algerian Assembly. The Moslems would be likely to reject “Ulsterization,” however, since it would alienate from them the wealthiest and most highly developed part of the country, as well as the richest strip of agricultural land. What is more, this solution, involving another policy of partition and the creation of another Western-sponsored state within the Arab world, might only produce another “Israeli problem” in North Africa.

One other logical solution which the French are not quite ready to discuss is the possibility of bringing about the gradual withdrawal of the colons from Algeria and liquidating their economic holdings on the basis of fair compensation. The Tunisian colons are already urging the French Government to take the $42,000,000 which now goes to subsidize the Tunisian Government and use the money to compensate them for their landholdings prior to their repatriation. Although the Algerian colons are doubtless much more reluctant than their Tunisian counterparts to pull up stakes and leave, they may gradually come to accept the “evacuation with compensation” formula as preferable to living in an environment of mounting cultural tension, in which the rate of growth is considerably higher for the Arab- Berber population than for the Europeans. The financial burden of any compensation scheme would fall upon the French Government, but compensation may prove less costly in the long run than the present French policy of subsidizing two-thirds of Algeria’s purchases from the metropolitan area. At present, nearly a million acres of the best Algerian land are given over to wine production. Since the Moslems do not consume the wine, it is practically all sent to France, which already has too much wine. Most of the imports from France into Algeria, which necessitate the subsidy, are luxury items purchased by the Europeans, such as automobiles. The existence of the double standard of living, therefore, makes Algeria an economic millstone around France’s neck. If the colons could be induced to liquidate their holdings and move to France, Algeria would have the opportunity to become economically more viable. The grapevines could be replaced by grains, fruits and vegetables for the expanding native population while the luxury imports would be curtailed. The way could then be open for France to work out, perhaps with the intermediary help of Morocco and Tunisia, an orderly transition to an autonomous Algeria, administered by native Algerians, as a member of a French-orientated Maghreb Confederation. The Premier of Tunisia and the Sultan of Morocco are already reported to be interested in a plan for a Maghreb federation in North Africa in which the Sultan expects to assume the role of spiritual leader and Premier Bourguiba would emerge as the predominant political figure. Official French policy, however, still seems to be complete pacification, elections, and discussions between the elected Algerian representatives and Paris in that sequence.

On November 21, 1956, Robert Lacoste, Minister Resident in Algeria, delivered a highly optimistic report to the French government in which he favored a continuation of this policy. Mr. Lacoste stated that the quick victory of the British-French forces over Colonel Nasser’s Army had influenced the thinking of Algerian Moslems who had been counting heavily on Egypt’s Army for support. He also said that the capture of the five rebel leaders which was discussed earlier in this paper had brought about the disorganization of the rebel forces. The rebel guerrillas, he said, were having increasing difficulty getting supplies even from Tunisia and Morocco and appeared to be tired and less combative.

Even if Mr. Lacoste’s report concerning the chances for success of France’s military operations in Algeria is not overly optimistic, it is clear that the need for a political solution is more urgent than ever. In view of the uncertainty surrounding the question of just who is behind the FLN, mediation by Tunisia and Morocco is desirable to preclude the emergence of the FLN as the sole negotiator for the legitimate Algerian aspirations toward national autonomy. It will not serve Algeria’s true interests merely to exchange its present status in the French Union for the possibility of domination by Colonel Nasser, or the even more grave possibility of domination by forces further to the east.

Mr. Cottrell was a tank gunner with the 3rd U. S. Army in France and Germany during World War II. A graduate of Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, he is now a research assistant, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and an Instructor of Political Science as well as assistant to the chairman, International Relations Group Committee, University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Dougherty served in the U. S. Army as a 1st Lieutenant, Infantry, during World War II. A graduate of St. Joseph’s College and Fordham, he is also a research assistant, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Joseph’s College.

Mr. Cottrell and Mr. Dougherty are co-authors with Robert Strausz-Hupé of the book American-Asian Tensions, published by Frederick Praeger in 1956.

★

A FAST TRIP TO THE BRIG

Contributed by CAPTAIN FREDERICK L. OLIVER, U. S. Navy (Retired)

One morning many years ago in the USS Milwaukee (circa 1891), the quartermaster of the watch on his return from the 0900 reading of the patent log, created consternation by reporting the ship had logged 15 knots during the past hour, standard speed being 12 knots.

On inquiry the engine room reported turns for 15 knots were being made, the increase in speed having been made at 0800 by order of the engineer officer.

Investigation disclosed that the engineer officer’s mess boy, John, and a colored pal had had an argument over John’s claim that he could “make the ship go faster.” To clinch the wager that was made, John, while the engineer officer was having his breakfast, took the other mess boy to the chief’s stateroom and gave an order to the engine room over the voice tube for increased speed.

John won the bet; also a sojourn in the brig.

(The Proceedings will pay $5.00 for each anecdote submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)