But these interests, world-wide though they are, fail to satisfy the German expansionist party whose prophet is the Kaiser. They demand something more material than figures; they would see the German flag floating over government houses instead of warehouses, over fortifications instead of plantations. They would see more of the map of the world painted in German 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 England nor Portugal had troubled to include it in their dominions; though she bullied China into leasing her the port of Kiauchau, the further territorial expansion in the Celestial Empire of which she had dreamed was halted by Russian jealousy and Japanese ambition; around Latin America—the most enticing field of all—stretched the protecting arm of the Monroe Doctrine.
Now, these “Keep Off the Grass” signs with which she was everywhere confronted did not improve Germany's disposition. They made her feel abused and peevish, and whenever she saw a foreign flag flying over some God-forsaken islet in the Pacific or a stretch of snake-infested African jungle, she resented it deeply and said that she was being denied “a place in the sun.” So when France despatched an expedition to Fez in the summer of 1911 to teach the Moorish tribesmen proper respect for French property and French lives, Germany 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 Abdul Aziz extensive mining, ranching, and plantation concessions in that portion of his empire which the German newspapers proceeded to prematurely dub “West Marokko Deutsch.” The rich iron deposits in this region, when taken in conjunction with the alarming decrease of the ore supply in the German mines and the consequent shortage which threatens the German iron and steel industry, undoubtedly provided one of the reasons underlying the Kaiser's interference with the French programme in Morocco.
France, knowing full well the enormous political and commercial value of Morocco, and determined to complete her African empire by its acquirement, after months of haggling, during which battle-ships and army corps were moved about like chessmen, consented to compensate Germany by ceding her a slice of the colony of French Equatorial Africa, better known, perhaps, as the French Congo. [4] It was a good bargain that France made, too, for she took an empire and gave a jungle in exchange. But Germany made the better bargain, it seems 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 territory which she had wanted, watched, and waited for ever since she entered the game of colonial expansion. It is one of the links—in many respects the most essential one—which she requires to connect her scattered possessions in the Dark Continent and to bar the advance of her great rival, England, to the northward by stretching an unbroken chain of German colonies across Africa from coast to coast. The acquisition of that piece of west-coast jungle marked the greatest stride which Germany has yet taken in her march toward an empire oversea.
[4] Germany has given her new colony the official designation “New Kamerun.”
Heretofore Germany has been in much the same predicament as a boy who tries to put a picture puzzle together when some of the pieces are missing. In Germany's case the missing pieces were held by England, France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give them up. If you will open the family atlas to the map of Africa, you will see that Germany's four colonies on that continent are so widely separated that their consolidation is apparently out of the question. Northernmost of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pestilential coast-line variously named and noted for its slaves, its ivory, and its gold, and aptly called “the rottenest coast in the world,” is the colony of Togo. Approximately the 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 German Southwest Africa, a barren, inhospitable, sparsely populated land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far inland as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the continent, just south of the Equator, lies German East Africa, almost twice the size of the mother country and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's transmarine possessions. The combined area of these four colonies is equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi put together; certainly a substantial foundation on which to begin the erection of an empire, especially when it is remembered that French Africa, which now comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the most part the work of but a single generation.
When Monsieur Cambon and Herr von Kiderlein-Waechter put their pens to the piece of parchment of which I have already spoken, the boundary of the Kamerun was automatically extended southward almost to the Equator and eastward some hundreds of miles to the Logone River, the apex of the angle formed by the meeting of these new frontiers touching the Congo River and thereby bringing the Kamerun into contact with the Belgian Congo. In other words, Germany's great colonies on either coast are no longer separated by French and Belgian territory, but by Belgian alone—and Belgium, remember, is both weak and neutral. Now, it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Belgium might consent to sell Germany either the whole or a portion 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 excuse for her vigorous and persistent advocacy of the internationalisation of the Congo. Though France holds the reversionary rights to the Congo, there are no grounds for believing that she would place any serious obstacles in the way of its acquisition by Germany, for she has given it to be understood that she intends devoting her energies henceforward to the exploitation of her enormous possessions in North Africa. Assuming, then—and these assumptions, believe me, are not nearly so chimerical as they may sound—that the Belgian Government should sell Germany all or a part of the Congo, Germany's possessions would then stretch across the continent from coast to coast, comprising all that is most worth having in Equatorial Africa.
While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions one step farther and take it for granted that Portugal could be induced to dispose of her great west-coast colony of Angola, to which Germany already possesses the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps another Agadir performance, based on some easily found pretext and backed up by German war-ships in the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government to hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, 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 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 Portuguese Foreign Office with a view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast colony of Mozambique. [5] The acquisition of Angola would supply Germany with the final link needed to unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa, thus giving her an African empire second in size only to that of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this may sound, I have but roughly sketched for you that imperial dream for whose fulfilment the Kaiser and his people are indefatigably working and confidently waiting.
[5] Though commonly applied to the colony of Portuguese East Africa, the name Mozambique belongs, strictly speaking, only to the northernmost province of that possession.
Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 1898, England and Germany concluded a secret agreement which definitely provides for the eventual disposition of Portugal's African possessions. Of its true history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. It grew out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and ambitious schemes for the consolidation of British dominion in Africa. Appreciating, early in the Boer War, that England's success in that struggle would largely depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that master statesman proposed to the Berlin Government a plan the effect of which was to divide the reversion of Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain and 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 more important for strategical and commercial reasons, for the “Afro” railway, of which I have made mention in the chapter on Morocco, will become in the near future the great highway between Europe and South America, while the railway now being built between Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will provide the easiest and quickest means of communicating with Rhodesia and the Transvaal. The terms of the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, however, as indicating how that portion of the African continent lying south of the Congo will be eventually parcelled out, and as showing the framework on which is being slowly but surely constructed Germany's African empire.
The erection of such a German state across the middle of Africa would have far-reaching results in more directions than one. In the first place, it would end forever England's long-cherished ambition of eventually linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions 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 removing the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under international auspices, to a very distant day, and making Dar-es-Salam and Duala, instead of Cape Town and Alexandria, the starting-points for those highways of steel which are destined to open up inner Africa.