'On September 18th I received from Chamberlain a letter from Leipsic, in which he said: "The Cameroons! It is enough to make one sick. As you say, we decided to assume the protectorate eighteen months ago, and I thought it was all settled. If the Board of Trade or Local Government Board managed their business after the fashion of the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, you and I would deserve to be hung."'

Those who thought with Sir Charles felt considerable anxiety about possibilities on the East Coast of Africa. The Cameroons were lost, but a protectorate over Zanzibar had been offered, and Zanzibar was the outlet for an important trading district, which the forward party thought of securing. The Prime Minister was opposed to all such schemes. 'On December 14th Mr. Gladstone broke out against the proposed annexations in what is now called the Kilimanjaro district.'

He wrote to Sir Charles: 'Terribly have I been puzzled and perplexed on finding a group of the soberest men among us to have concocted a scheme such as that touching the mountain country behind Zanzibar with an unrememberable name. There must somewhere or other be reasons for it which have not come before me. I have asked Granville whether it may not stand over for a while.' [Footnote: The allusion is to the treaties with native chiefs which were negotiated by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Harry Johnston in 1883-84. These treaties were the foundation of what is now known as British East Africa, and related mainly to the Kilimanjaro and Taveita districts. It would appear that Mr. Gladstone himself had at first expressed an interest in the development of British influence 'over this hinterland of snow mountains and elevated plateaux,' to which his attention had been drawn by the report of Mr. Joseph Thomson. Speaking subsequently at the Colonial Institute, Sir Harry Johnston said that 'about twenty years ago he was making preparations for his first expedition to British Africa. He had a very distinguished predecessor, whom he regarded as the real originator of British East Africa: Mr. Joseph Thomson, who died all too young in 1895. His great journey from Mombasa was commenced in 1882 and finished in 1884…. His reports sent home to the Royal Geographical Society had attracted the attention of Mr. Gladstone; and there was another British statesman, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who perhaps more than most of his colleagues saw the possibility of a white man's settlement in Equatorial Africa, and who chose to select him (Sir H. Johnston) as one agency by which this work should be commenced.' (Journal of the Royal Colonial Institute, 1903-04, No. 5, p. 317.) The territory covered by the Kilimanjaro Treaties was ceded to Germany under the arrangement made at the end of 1885, but the remainder has continued to be British (see Sir Harry Johnston, A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races, pp. 376-409.]

Mr. Gladstone could not bring himself to understand that the great States of Europe had, almost without premeditation, moved into a field of policy which involved the apportionment of regions scarcely yet known in any detail to the geographers; nor did he realize the far-reaching consequences of the acquisition or refusal of some of these districts. The question of the Congo, for example, involved, as Sir Robert Morier had foreseen, the settlement of the whole West African coast. In April Sir Charles had recorded how he

'had to read up African papers, and found reason to fear that the King of the Belgians was contemplating the sale of his Congo dominions to France. We had a meeting at the Foreign Office in the afternoon, [Footnote: April 26th, 1884.] at which were present Lord Granville, Kimberley, Chamberlain, myself, and Fitzmaurice, and, finding that we could not possibly carry our Congo Treaty with Portugal, we determined to find a way out by referring it to the Powers.' [Footnote: The following extract from an article in the Quarterly Review explains the importance attached by Sir Charles to this Congo treaty, and the far-reaching results which it would have had:

'In 1875 the results of Lieutenant Cameron's great journey across Africa became known…. They revealed … the material for a Central African Empire awaiting the enterprise of a European or an Asiatic power. There is now little doubt that, had the famous treaty negotiated by Sir Charles Dilke, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, and Sir Robert Morier in 1884, been ratified and carried out … the Congo Basin would have been added to the British Empire, together with Delagoa Bay and Nyasaland, before its time; with Dahomey also, and an all-British West African Coast between Sierra Leone and the Gaboon.' (Quarterly Review, January, 1906.)

It would perhaps have been more accurate had the author spoken of the 'treaty proposed to be negotiated.' The original plan of Sir Robert Morier—part of a large scheme for the settlement of all outstanding questions with Portugal—contemplated inter alia some territorial acquisition on the Congo by Great Britain. But the Cabinet put a veto on this. The Foreign Office had therefore to fall back on the alternative but less ambitious plan contained in the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1884, which was never ratified, owing to the opposition of Germany. (Life of Granville, vol. ii., chap. x.; and supra, I. 418. See also on this subject the observations of Sir Harry Johnston in his History, quoted above, pp. 277, 278, 343, 405.)]

In October he goes on to relate how

'Lord Granville had been frightened by Plessen, the Prussian, coming to invite him to a Conference at Berlin, but explained that he had been much relieved on finding, as he put it, that it was only about the Congo. It was, however, the famous Africa Conference which virtually settled the whole future of the Dark Continent.'

Sir Charles notes the result in January, 1885: