The Last Frontier

nt, caused a territory almost as large as the State of Texas to become French, and another territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to become German. About as many peopl

ad of Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese blacks who compose the other fifth, they will soon find, unless I am very much mistaken, that the red-white-and-black flag stands for something very different from the r

some seven and twenty years ago, and which he recently translated to the world in the declaration "Germany's future lies oversea." In those four words is found the foreign policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of Morocco and ended with Germany's

e cannot obtain by threats she stands perfectly ready to obtain by going to war. Having once made up her mind that the realisation of her political, commercial, and economic ambitions requires her to have a colonial [Pg 167] dominion, she is not going to permit anything to stand in the way of her getting it. In other words, wherever an excuse can be provided for raising a flagstaff, whether on an ice-floe in the Arctic or an atoll in the South Pacific, there the German flag shall flutter; wherever trade is to be found, there Hamburg

tates-Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul-that the Brazilian Government has [Pg 168] become seriously alarmed. Their mines in Persia and China and the Rand rival the cave of Aladdin. They are completing a trunk line across western Asia which threatens to endanger England's commercial supremacy in India; in Africa they are pushing forward another railway from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes which will rival the Cape-to-Cairo system in tapping the trade of the Dark Continent. They own the light, power, and transportation monopolies of half the capitals of Latin America. In China the coal mines and railways of the great pr

them exercise in certain quarters of the world-particularly in that Latin America which we have complacently regarded as securely within our own commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank not only controls the great Anatolian Railway system but it is building the Bagdad Railway-probably the most important of Germany's foreign undertakings-these two German-owned systems providing a route by which German goods can be carried over German rails to India more cheaply than England can transport her own goods to her possessions in her own bottoms. In one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the railway and mining concessions of the Chinese province of Shantung, while with the other it reaches out across the world to grasp the railway system

the purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the necessity for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here are some of the figures, taken from the

ica $

22

1,

r 1

ue 2

ar 1

h Africa

he Balkans

and Ceylon

tlements

87

87,

d Colombia

hile 1

e 18

400

though possessing stable governments, would not be strong enough successfully to resist German aggression or German demands. In regions where German settlers abound and where German banks are in financial control it is seldom difficult for Germany to find an excuse for meddling. It may be that a German settler is attacked, or a German consul insulted, or a German bank has difficulty in collecting its debts. So the slim cables carry a dash-dotted message to the Foreign Office in Berlin; instantly the cry goes up that in Morocco or China or Venezuela or H

n colours. But Germany was late in getting into the colonising game, so that wherever she has gone she has found other nations already in possession. In North Africa her prospectors and concession-hunters found the French too firmly established to be ousted; the only territory left in South Africa over which she could raise her flag was so arid and worthless that neither

property and French lives, Germany [Pg 173] seized on that action as an excuse for occupying a Moroccan harbour and a strip of the adjacent coast, on the pretext that her interests there were being jeopardised, and flatly refused to evacuate it unless France gave her something in return. I might mention, in passing, that Germany's interests in Morocco are considerably more important than is generally supposed, the powerful Westphalian firm of Mannesmann Brothers having obtained from Sultan Ab

to me, for by agreeing to a French protectorate over Morocco she obtained one hundred thousand square miles of African soil without its costing her a foot of land or a dollar in exchange. From the view-point of the world at large, Germany emerged from the Moroccan imbroglio with a good-sized strip of equatorial territory, presumably rich in undeveloped resources, certainly rich in savages, snakes, and fevers, and, everything considered, of very doubtful value. But to Germany this stretch of jungle land meant far more than that. It was a ter

new colony the official

size of Cuba and rich in native products, it is so remote from the other German possessions that its only value is in providing Germany with a quid pro quo which she can use in negotiating for some territory more desirable. In the right angle formed by the Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich, fertile, and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size of Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to Lake Tchad, it has hitherto been destitute of good harbours or navigable rivers, being barred from the Niger by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until the recent territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa. Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to the southward and you will come to

of the Congo, for the financial difficulties of that colony have been very great, and it has never been able to pay its way, its wants having been supplied at first by large gifts of money from King Leopold, and more recently by loans raised and guaranteed by Belgium. This unsatisfactory financial condition not having helped to popularise the Congo with the thrifty Belgians, there is considerable reason to believe that the Brussels Government would lend an attentive ear to any proposals which Germany might make toward its purchase. England might be expected, of course, to oppose the sale of the Congo to Germany tooth and nail, it being the fear of just such an eventuality which caused her to seize on the rubber atrocities as an excus

ery, to the Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its government is weak and vacillating, and a long list of failures has left the people with little stomach for colonisation. The Portuguese Republic has few friends among the monarchical nations of Europe and could count on scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It [Pg 178] is asserted in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on the Morocco-Equatoria Convention was scarcely dry before the German minister in Lisbon had opened secret pourparlers with the

East Africa, the name Mozambique belongs, strictly speak

79] Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand south of the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret Treaty, the final text of which was afterward signed by Lord Salisbury, and it was largely in virtue of this agreement that England was free from German interference during the Boer War. It is an interesting comment on the ethics of international politics that this remarkable agreement was concluded without any consultation of Portugal, the country the most vitally concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a necessity to England as it was in 1898, at which time it was the quickest way to reach the Transvaal, and, on the other hand, the West Coast is daily becoming

ossessions and thus completing an "All Red" route from Cairo to the Cape. In the second place, Germany is now in a position to build her own transcontinental railway-from east to west instead of from north to south-on German or neutral soil all the way, thus removin

ly fevers combine to make it deserving of its title-"the white man's graveyard." The statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and clang of German railway-builders' [Pg 181] tools, thou

ous colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to their own colonies, preferring those wh

harply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders-who form the backbone of every colony-to take up their residence in English

with bleeding backs are constantly making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny, brutality, and corruption-of some instances of which I was myself a witness-form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero nation in Germany's last "little war" in that colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign-which cost Germany five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, an

se invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by tri

ttest and unhealthiest coasts in the world-that is Dar-es-Salam. The hotel is, barring the one at Kandy in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the Canal Zone, the best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever [Pg 186] seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, for the benefit of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid-faced, pompadoured Prussian, was as independent as a hotel clerk in a city where a presidential convention is going on. Just as in the other German colonies, I found East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack of militarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards during my four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in Constantinople during the Turkish Revolution. I was lulled to sleep by regimental bugles and I was awakened by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot out of doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, their black faces peering out stolidly from beneath the sun-aprons, their spindle shanks encased in spiral puttees, their feet rising and fall

iors. German

. A few years ago these men were ju

E WAR LORD IN

steamers will ply between Ujiji and Kituta, in northeastern Rhodesia, which point the British Cape-to-Cairo system is approaching. By the close of 1914, in all probability therefore, the traveller who lands at Dar-es-Salam will be able to travel by train, with the passage across Lake Tanganyika as the only interruption, to the Cape of Good Hope, or by train and river steamer to the mouth of the Congo, and in [Pg 188] perfect comfort and safety all the way. As Walfish Bay, the only harbour in Southwest Africa worthy of the name, belongs to England, the Germans, finding themselves unable to buy it and appreciating that a harbourless colony is all but worthless, promptly set to work and built themselves artificial harbours at Swakopmund and at Lüderitz Bay, though at appalling cost. That Germany is exceedingly anxious to acquire Walfish Bay, and that she stands ready to make almost any reasonable concession to obtain it, there is little doubt. The mere fac

velling by railway moto

line of the German

NG THROUG

pouring out money unstintingly in the construction of roads, bridges, and reservoirs, the sinking of artesian wells, the establishment of telegraph lines and postal routes, the erection of schools and hospitals, in furnishing trees to the planters and machinery and live-stock to the farmers, and in assisting immigration