THE THIRD EMPIRE
WE have witnessed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world. In less than a generation we have seen the French dream of an African empire stretching without interruption from the Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. French imperialism did not end, as the historians would have you believe, on that September day in 1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his throne at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had scarcely died away before the French empire-builders were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceanica, founding on every seaboard of the world a new and greater France. In the two-score years that have elapsed since France's année terrible her neglected and scattered colonies have been expanded into a third empire—an empire oversea. She has had her revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic colonial ambition in every quarter of the globe: in China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in Morocco the advance of the German vorlopers has been halted by the harsh “Qui vive?” of the French videttes.
Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phœnicia first began to nibble at the continent, it was not until 1884 that the mad rush began which ended in Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang of boys would divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a continent, lock, stock, and barrel, is one of the most astounding performances in history. France emerged from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than any other power, a territory which she has so steadily and systematically expanded and consolidated that to-day her sphere of influence extends over forty-five per cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of the population of Africa.
So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the French empire-builders worked that even those of us who pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the march of civilisation are fairly amazed when we trace on the map the distances to which they have pushed the Republic's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that the fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel southward from Algiers must ride as far as from Milwaukee to the City of Mexico before he can pass beyond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of the French law? Were you aware that if you start from the easternmost boundary of the French Sudan you will have to cover a distance equal to that from Buffalo to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? It is, indeed, not the slightest exaggeration to say that French influence is to-day predominant over all that expanse of the Dark Continent lying west of the Nile basin and north of the Congo—a territory one and a half times the size of the United States—thus forming the only continuous empire in Africa, with ports on every seaboard of the continent.
With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a century, being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a colony at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds perfunctory audiences in his Palace of the Bardo, it is from the French Residency that the protectorate is really ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under Italian dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinterland. And now, after years of intrigue and machinations, which twice have brought her to the brink of war, France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic victories of our time, has won the last of the world's great territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her colonial edifice by adding the empire of Morocco—under the guise of a protectorate—to her oversea domain.
On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and Mauritania (the last named a newly organised colony formed from portions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area of these possessions alone being about equal to that of European Russia.
From the Congo northward to the confines of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan stretches the great colony of French Equatorial Africa—formerly known as the French Congo—the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de Brazza, counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley and his patron, King Leopold, thus forming one of the most dramatic incidents in the scramble for Africa. Though potentially the most valuable of the French West African possessions, being enormously rich in both jungle and mineral products, notably rubber, ivory, and copper, France has taken surprisingly little interest in this colony's development, and, as a result, it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost pitiful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness of French Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, the whole territory being a breeding-ground for small-pox, blood diseases, tropical fevers in their most virulent forms, and, worst of all, the terrible sleeping-sickness; second, the almost total lack of easy means of communication, the back door through the Belgian Congo being the only direct means of access to the greater part of the colony, which was virtually cut in half by the broad area lying between the southern boundary of Kamerun and the equator and extending eastward from the coast to the Ubangi River, which France ceded to Germany in 1911 as a quid pro quo for being permitted a free hand in Morocco, and which has been renamed “New Kamerun.” Though the economic development of this region must prove, under any circumstances, a difficult, dangerous, and discouraging task, it can be accomplished if the government will divert its attention from its projects in North Africa long enough to make Libreville a decent port, to provide adequate steamer services on the great rivers that intersect the colony, and to link up those rivers with each other and with the coast by a system of railways.