Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/100

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THE STORY OF MOROCCO
83

other European residents. Following the bombardment, the French landed a large body of troops, permanently occupied Casablanca and Rabat, and gradually overran the whole of the Shawiya district where, for three year incessant military expeditions, dispatched in every direction, prosecuted the task of "pacifying" the country, causing "much blood to flow."[1] With supreme irony the French Government called upon the already impoverished Moorish exchequer to meet the expenses involved in these acts of "peaceful penetration," and forced an "indemnity" of £2,400,000 upon the Moorish Government. Taxed beyond endurance to meet these demands, and infuriated "by the inability of their ruler to protect them against French encroachments, the Moors deposed Abdulaziz, and proclaimed his brother, Mulai Hafid, Sultan, but not before a civil war had intensified the internal chaos into which the country was rapidly drifting. Instantly international finance, used by the French Government as a convenient lever, dug its talons afresh into the dying Moorish State. Mulai Hafid was compelled to contract a loan. He was not even consulted about it. All liabilities incurred by Abdulaziz since the consolidated French loan of 1904, were merged into a new £4,040,000 loan—secured upon various sources of Moorish revenue, including the remaining 40 per cent, of the Customs—by an international banking syndicate, in which France held the lion's share. On being requested to sign the document embodying the transaction, Mulai Hafid refused. France thereupon presented him with an ultimatum and he had perforce to give way. It was not really a loan at all. The Sultan could not touch the capital because it had already been earmarked by the bondholders to pay off Morocco's previous debts. Nor could he meet the interest upon it except by imposing more direct taxes upon his subjects, seeing that he had been deprived under its terms of the remaining sources of indirect taxation. The "loan" was, in fact, an enforced tribute for the benefit of cosmopolitan finance, which was cosmopolitan and not merely French only because some other countries were interested, either politically or financially or for both reasons, in preventing the French from securing complete financial control of Morocco's resources. Thus, while

  1. Augustin Bernard.