13

May last is by way of being an inspired Spanish communiqué.1 Moreover, not a scintilla of evidence has ever been adduced in support of the allegation.

That Germany was extremely irritated at 'being cheated 'as M. Millet puts it-is obvious from the speeches of the German Foreign Secretary. But only those who have wilfully blinded themselves by prejudice can retain any doubt that the genesis of German action lay in the circumstance that German statesmen were faced with a second concerted attempt on the part of France, backed by the British Foreign Office, to seize Morocco without giving Germany any compensation, without making any provisions for the open door,' without taking into account the de facto and de jure rights of Germany in the matter.

To present a superficially plausible indictment of German bad faith as regards the open door' in connexion with the Franco-German agreement of February 1909, M. Millet is driven to characteristic expedients. In describing the arrangement in question he conveniently omits all reference to the pivot upon. which it revolved-viz. the renewed pledge by France of firm attachment to the maintenance of the independence and integrity of the Shereefian Empire.' He then proceeds to confuse under the term 'economic (a) the open door' for trade, and (b) the financial combinations of international groups for the construction of public works. These are totally different things, of course. One interests British commerce very materially; the other may not interest it at all. The general interests of trade lie outside financial combinations between banking establishments for loans, railway or harbour works. If there is one thing clear in this controversy, into which so much deliberate misrepresentation has been introduced, it is that Germany has pursued unflinchingly the 'open door' for trade in Morocco from the very first. She has never wavered. We have been lukewarm. And her Chambers of Commerce are already demanding that the open door' shall be reintroduced into the Congo territories ceded to her by France, which for the last twelve years have been the happy hunting-ground of French rubber monopolists. Germany has obtained from France in Morocco what the British Government

"Published in The Times of June 3. 'Then came the German coup at Agadir, which was welcomed with undisguised satisfaction at Madrid as a proof that others besides Spain felt that the changed situation required energetic action. This satisfaction was doomed to be somewhat diminished by the subsequent refusal of both Berlin and Paris to admit Spain as a third party to their deliberations. Of course, the German Government denied that Germany had any such intention at once-viz. on the 4th of July and again on the 12th of July (1911).

14 'The Government of the French Republic, fully attached to the maintenance of the independence and integrity of the Shereefian Empire,' etc. For full text see Appendix XIV., Morocco in Diplomacy.

failed to obtain in 1904-a permanent open door' for international trade. Lord Lansdowne stipulated the non-imposition of differential tariffs for thirty years only: the same period which, after the greatest difficulties, Lord Salisbury succeeded in wresting from France in the 1898 agreement affecting West Africa. Germany has wiped off the differential tariff altogether from Morocco. In so doing she has placed British trade interests under a deep obligation, and every British Chamber of Commerce knows it. It is not among commercial men, who used to be given some credit for common sense, that you will find this clamour against Germany over everything in general and particular.

Now as to the financial combinations between international groups for the construction of public works in Morocco-a very small affair compared with the great trade interest. It is possible, it is even probable, that Germany tried her hardest to secure for her financiers as large a share as possible in these enterprises. She already held 20 per cent. of the 1910 loan, compared with France's 40 per cent. and Britain's 15 per cent. I should be quite prepared to admit that she had been grasping. It is, perhaps, not an uncommon characteristic among financiers of every nation. It would strengthen the argument that, all through, Germany's interest in Morocco was economic, not territorial, and that her well-known official pursuit of business' overseas-imposed upon her by the necessities of her own internal position was the guiding motive which impelled her as a matter of national policy not to allow another great slice of African territory, potentially valuable and where she had long connexions and treaty rights, to pass into the hands of a Power which converts every dependency it acquires into a privileged reserve for French trade and French contractors. But when M. Millet, in his clumsy attempt to square the circle of his own prejudices, denounces the alleged (alleged because here again no documentary proof is adduced) efforts of the German Government to secure the construction of all railways on behalf of the Société marocaine des travaux publics, as a demand 'in favour of one privileged Franco-German company only, to the exclusion of all foreign, and more especially English, interests,' he is laughing in his sleeve at a guileless British public whom he thinks by this allegation to rub on the raw. No one knows better than M. Millet, since his own paper, Le Temps, published the details in its issue of the 11th of January 1912, that France holds threesixths of the capital of this concern, Germany two-sixths, Britain and Spain one-sixth between them. Consequently all contracts for railway construction secured by the Société marocaine would have benefited British capitalists in accordance with the

proportion of the total capital held by them. If Germany, as M. Millet argues, was oblivious of the Algeciras Act-which France was busily trampling under foot-in making this request (assuming that she did), how can M. Millet argue that France was observing the Act by holding the majority of the capital herself? It requires a certain effort of the imagination, moreover, to suppose the French Government to have been anxious to contract-out of an arrangement so favourable to French financiers, in order to please-as M. Millet tells us-its dear English friends. The treatment meted out to British interests in the Franco-British Abyssinian Railway provides a somewhat satirical illustration of M. Millet's contention, in itself sufficiently humorous when one recalls the treatment of British economic interests of every kind in Madagascar, in Tunis, and elsewhere!

But if we wish to appreciate the full beauty of the controversial red-herring drawn across the trail by M. Millet and his colleague M. André Tardieu, we have only to contrast the terms. of the Franco-German Convention of November 1911 15 with the Anglo-French agreement of April 1904,16 and still more with the secret Franco-Spanish Convention of October 1904," which received the blessing of the British Foreign Office. To what do we owe that British financial interests are represented in the future construction of public works in Morocco at all? To German intervention, and to German intervention alone! It is easy to prove that from the texts. I have already shown that in the matter of the open door' for general trade our Foreign Office only secured freedom from differential tariffs for thirty years, whereas Germany has secured that relief for all time. In the matter of public works construction the agreement of 1904 is dumb. Not so the Franco-Spanish secret partition Convention. There is no dumbness about that. It literally shouts at you. Article 10 of that document provides that all schemes for public works, railways, etc., mineral development, and economic undertakings in general' in the French and Spanish spheres— i.e. in the whole of Morocco-' shall be executed' by French and Spanish enterprise respectively! So little did the Foreign Office care for British enterprise that it handed over Morocco lock, stock, and barrel to a Franco-Spanish economic monopoly for ever! Now turn to the Franco-German Convention of November 1911. The minutest safeguards are taken therein that there shall be international participation in all such works. There must be open tenders for all contracts for construction, and even for the supply of material, issued under such conditions and circumstances as shall not place the subjects of any one Power 15 Appendix XVII., op. cit. 16 Appendix III., idem.

17 Appendix VI., idem.

in a position of inferiority. All nations must be free to participate in the actual working of public undertakings. Industrial and mining enterprises must be free to lay down light lines of railway from their centres of activity to the coast ports. There are to be no export duties on iron ore, and so on. Of course, Germany has benefited herself. Of course, she has had her own economic interests primarily in view. But the point is that in benefiting herself she has benefited the world, and the greatest trading nation in the world, Britain. And it is this unanswerable fact which crowns the fatuousness of the diplomatic and journalistic spite exhibited towards Germany throughout the whole of this miserable business. M. Millet talks about the lesson of the future.' That is the lesson of the future. For my part I am well content to point it out, even if I have the misfortune to appear a 'kind of German Siegfried' in the eyes of the spokesmen of Le Temps.

One last reflection, of an egotistical nature, which is forced upon me by the personal character of the attack delivered by M. Millet. He says I am known for my unfriendliness to France' ever since I 'ruthlessly attacked' the French Congo, for - which he and M. Tardieu have so tender a solicitude. It is quite. true that I attacked the administration of the French Congo when financial and journalistic wire-pullers in Paris got rid of that magnificent administrator De Brazza, and introduced into the country the Leopoldian system with all its abuses, handing over to forty-four concessionnaire companies the land, the products, the labour, and the very bodies of 7,000,000 negroes. And was I right or wrong? Events have shown that my case was immeasurably understated. Let the De Brazza mission of inquiry, the letters published in Le Temps itself (then in other hands), from its special commissioner M. Félicien Challaye, the books of Auguste Chevalier 18 and Challaye," the speeches of Anatole France and Pierre Mille, the ghastly official reports sent home in dozens by French official inspectors' on the spot, the revelations before the courts, the huge volume of evidence which is publicly accessible, including the detailed condemnation of the whole system officially placed before the French Legislature in the Colonial budgetary reports-let these speak. I am no enemy of France. My book dealing with French West Africa 20 was translated by the chief of staff of the African department of the French Colonial Office, and appeared serially in the Official

18 Mission Chari-Lac Tchad (Challamel, 1908).

19 Le Congo français; also Les deux Congo, by Challaye and Pierre Mille (Cahiers de la Quinzaine).

10

Affairs of West Africa (Heinemann): French edition, Problèmes de l'Ouest Africain (Challamel).

Journal of that Department, precisely because it was the first effort made by a foreigner to do something like justice to the great work France has accomplished in West Africa, where, happily, a fine staff and honest merchants have been able, in combination, to keep out the blood-sucking concessionnaire. I am no enemy of France, although I do not believe it is a British national interest that we should be tied to the cartwheels of, and our policy compromised by, the military and colonial parties in France. But I do not consider it to be in the interests either of the British or French peoples that they should be worked up into blind prejudice of Germany regardless of the merits or demerits of the specific issue which may be at stake, on the strength of 'cooked' information. I do not believe in inevitable' wars, and I use my limited intelligence in testifying to these views and in trying to make other people share them.

E. D. MOREL.