A still nobler triumph in the exhibition of moral power was beheld in his dealings with the region called Great Kabylia, the superb range of the Djurjura Mountains extending eastward from Algiers.  The hardy Kabyles of that territory had remained unsubdued amid the changing governments which had risen and fallen around them.  As independent little republics, bound together by the most exalted spirit of freedom, they had ever preserved their usages, customs, and laws.  In September, 1839, Abd-el-Kader, attended by only fifty horsemen, suddenly appeared among them.  Thousands gathered around his tent from the valleys and fastnesses.  He addressed them in a stirring and argumentative harangue, pointing out union under his standard as the only safeguard against French conquest.  With loud shouts they accepted his faithful caliph, Ben Salem, as their chief in war, and agreed to pay the regular imposts and to go forth to the Djehad.  For thirty days the Sultan made a progress through the country, everywhere received with joy and enthusiasm as a venerated hadji and marabout, as a teacher of the law, as a man of pious life, as a renowned warrior and an eloquent preacher.  We cannot dwell here on his educational and moral reforms, his earnest efforts to enforce the teaching of the Koran, which was his guide in his public and private life.  His beneficent intentions were all to be frustrated by the ambition of a European nation which was to signally fail, not in the work of conquering Abd-el-Kader, but in turning her conquest to good account.

Hastily drawn treaties are a prolific source of war.  The Treaty of the Tafna was a flagrant example of this class of diplomatic documents.  There were two drafts:  one in Arabic, with the Sultan’s seal; the other in French, with Bugeaud’s.  The drafts were not carefully compared.  The limits of territory assigned to each of the parties were not made clear.  One instance of the lack of identity in the two forms of the instrument will suffice.  The French form declared that Abd-el-Kader acknowledged the sovereignty of France.  The Sultan had never dreamed of making an admission which, in its effect on the tribes, would have cost him his throne.  What he had written, in Arabic, in the article which he subscribed, was, properly translated, “The Emir Abd-el-Kader acknowledges that there is a French Sultan, and that he is great.”

A new Governor-General, Marshal Valee, had assumed his functions at Algiers in November, 1837.  Disputes arose as to the territorial rights of the Sultan under the Tafna Treaty, and after vain negotiations and missions to and fro matters were brought to a head by Marshal Valee in the despatch of an expedition to march over some disputed ground as a demonstration of French power and an assertion of French rights.  A column under the Duc d’Orleans started from Milah, in the Province of Constantine, lately conquered by the French, to march across the disputed territory