undoubted inconvenience to the French. As with all loosely governed States in a condition much resembling the Europe of feudal times, the central authority at Fez exercised very little power over the nomadic tribesmen of the borders, to whom frontier lines existing on paper meant nothing, as they drove their flocks and herds to fresh pasturages. This state of affairs led to frontier "incidents." in the vague and indeterminate region separating the Morocco and Algerian frontiers. These "incidents" were quite unimportant in themselves, but they gave the military wing of the Frencn Algerian administration the necessary excuses for military action, which professional soldiers will ever, and necessarily, take. These frontier skirmishes were never more than a pretext put forward in Paris and Algiers to cover political designs. If the interminable public professions of amity and friendship towards the Moroccan Government which were the stock-in-trade of French politicians for many years had contained the least germ of sincerity, the fate of Morocco would have been very different—and so, probably, would have been the fate of Europe. France had many opportunities of proving herself a true friend of the Moroccan people. She could have strengthened and purified their Government, developed every legitimate French interest in the country without violence, and gradually established an effective direction over that country's internal affairs. The French Government could have done this while safeguarding the independence of the people and of their institutions. In so doing it might well have succeeded in recreating under the stimulus of French imagination and French genius the latent qualities of a race once great and powerful; revived the glories of an art whose achievements, still exquisite in their partial decay, are among the noblest monuments in the world; given a renewed impetus to that intensive cultivation which in Moorish hands once made of southern Spain the fairest and most fertile spot in Europe. The French Government chose a different path, a treacherous, selfish, and a bloody one, which it concealed as far as possible from its own people and pursued in defiance of repeated protests from the French Chamber. In treading that path the French Government was from 1904 onwards consistently supported by the British Foreign Office. I have told the story at length
