With the help of these Belgian diplomatic despatches we can now see the Morocco question in its true perspective: not as an isolated incident, but as the culmination of an old, and the starting point of a new, policy which, by a series of inevitable steps, was to lead the world into a gigantic war whose ultimate consequences to the British State no man can foretell. The Unionist Cabinet handed Morocco to France in 1904 in order to purchase French agreement to the perpetuation of our occupation of Egpt in defiance of our reiterated pledges to the Egyptian people. It concealed from the, people the fact that it had done so. That was the first wrong inflicted upon the British nation. The Unionist Cabinet acted in the way it did knowing full well that acute friction with Germany was bound to follow. The future of Morocco was not a matter which the British and French Governments could treat as a national issue between them without international trouble of the gravest kind. It was an international issue, and had been so recognised by an International Convention to which Britain, France and Germany were signatories. Germany had a treaty with Morocco, kept a diplomatic representative at the Moorish capital, possessed considerable and growing commercial interests in the country, and had co-operated for many years with Britain in resisting French efforts to secure a privileged position within it. How could Germany, or any other great Power under similar circumstances, have acquiesced in such a transaction, especially in an era when the policy of industrially expanding European States was increasingly governed by the hunt for external markets? Germany's chief national need was free external markets. The secret arrangements connected with this Morocco deal made of Morocco a French economic monopoly. Diplomatic secrets are seldom kept. The Unionist Cabinet must have anticipated that this secret would not be kept. It could have had no illusion as to the effect of the disclosure upon Germany. The policy, then, was deliberate, although its full consequences may not have been foreseen. To retain Egypt we ran the risk of a breach with Germany ourselves and we set France and Germany by the ears. To retain Egypt! And to-day, sixteen years later, Egypt repudiates us! We have to hold her down by main force! We talk seriously of granting her independence! What prescience, what statesmanship—to pitch a flaming torch into the
