any European Power; her growing interests in Indo-China have impinged
only upon an English sphere of interest and were peacefully defined by
an Anglo-French Agreement of 1896. France has been the competitor, to
some extent the successful competitor, of Germany in West Africa, where
she partially envelops the Cameroons and Togoland. But the German
Government has never ventured to state the French colonial methods as a
_casus belli_. That the German people have viewed with jealousy the
growth of French power in Africa is a notorious fact. Quite recently, on
the eve of the present war, we were formally given to understand that
Germany, in any war with France, might annex French colonies[11]; and it
is easy to see how such an object would reconcile the divergent policies
of the German military and naval experts.

Up to the eve of the present war Great Britain has consistently refused
to believe that Germany would be mad enough or dishonest enough to enter
on a war of aggression for the dismemberment of colonial empires. German
diplomacy in the past few weeks has rudely shattered this conviction.
But up to the year 1914 the worst which was generally anticipated was
that she would pursue in the future on a great scale the policy, which
she has hitherto pursued on a small scale, of claiming so-called
'compensations' when other Powers succeeded in developing their colonial
spheres, and of invoking imaginary 'interests' as a reason why the
efforts of explorers and diplomatists should not be allowed to yield to
France their natural fruits of increased colonial trade. It is not our
business to impugn or to defend the partition of Africa, or the methods
by which it has been brought about. But it is vital to our subject that
we should describe the methods by which Germany has endeavoured to
intimidate France at various stages of the African question. The trouble
arose out of a Moroccan Agreement between England and France, which was
the first definite proof that these two Powers were drifting into