THE THIRD EMPIRE Drop Cap W WE have witnessed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world. In less than a generation we have seen the French dream of an African empire stretching without interruption from the Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. French imperialism did not end, as the historians would have you believe, on that September day in 1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his throne at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had scarcely died away before the French empire-builders were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceanica, founding on every seaboard of the world a new and greater France. In the two-score years that have elapsed since France's annÉe terrible her neglected and scattered colonies have been expanded into a third empire—an empire oversea. She has had her revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic colonial ambition in every quarter of the globe: in China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in Morocco the advance of the German vorlopers has been halted by the harsh “Qui vive?” of the French videttes. Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phoenicia first began to nibble at the continent, it was not until 1884 that the mad rush began which ended in Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang of boys would divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a continent, lock, stock, and barrel, is one of the most astounding performances in history. France emerged from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than any other power, a territory which she has so steadily and systematically expanded and consolidated that to-day her sphere of influence extends over forty-five per cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of the population of Africa. So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the French empire-builders worked that even those of us who pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the march of civilisation are fairly amazed when we trace on the map the distances to which they have pushed the Republic's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that the fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel southward from Algiers must ride as far as from Milwaukee to the City of Mexico before he can pass beyond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of the French law? Were you aware that if you start from the easternmost boundary of the French Sudan you will have to cover a distance equal to that from Buffalo to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? It is, indeed, not the slightest exaggeration to say that With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a century, being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a colony at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds perfunctory audiences in his Palace of the Bardo, it is from the French Residency that the protectorate is really ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under Italian dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinterland. And now, after years of intrigue and machinations, which twice have brought her to the brink of war, France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic victories of our time, has won the last of the world's great territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her colonial edifice by adding the empire of Morocco—under the guise of a protectorate—to her oversea domain. On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and Mauritania (the last named a newly organised colony formed from portions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area of these possessions alone being about equal to that of European Russia. From the Congo northward to the confines of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan stretches the great colony of French Equatorial Africa—formerly known as the French Congo—the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de Brazza, counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley and his patron, King Leopold, thus forming one of the most dramatic incidents in the scramble for Africa. Though potentially the most valuable of the French West African possessions, being enormously rich in both jungle and mineral products, notably rubber, ivory, and copper, France has taken surprisingly little interest in this colony's development, and, as a result, it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost pitiful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness of French Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, the whole territory being a breeding-ground for small-pox, blood diseases, tropical fevers in their most virulent forms, and, worst of all, the terrible sleeping-sickness; second, the almost total lack of easy means of communication, the back door through the Belgian Congo being the only direct means of access to the greater part of the colony, which was virtually cut in half by the broad area lying between the southern boundary of Lying on the northern frontier of French Equatorial Africa, and separating it from the Sahara, is the great Central African state of Kanem, with its organised native government, its important commerce, and its considerably developed civilisation, which was completely subjugated by France in 1903, Wadai, its powerful neighbour to the east, accepting a French protectorate in the same year. In the centre of this ring of colonies lie the million and a half square miles of the French Sahara, which the experiments of the French engineers have proved to be as capable of irrigation and cultivation as the one-time deserts of our own Southwest. Off the other side of the continent is the great colony of Madagascar, the second largest island in the world, in itself considerably larger than the mother country; while the French Somali Coast forms the sole gateway to Abyssinia and divides with the The territorial ambitions of most countries have been blazoned to the world by many wars. It took England two disastrous campaigns to win South Africa and two more to conquer the Sudan; Russia learned the same lesson in Manchuria at even a more terrible cost; while Italy's insecure foothold on the Red Sea shore was purchased by the annihilation of an army. Where other nations have won their colonial possessions by arms, France has won hers by adroitness. Always her policy has been one of pacific penetration. Trace the history of her African expansion and you will find no Majuba Hill, no Omdurman, no Adowa, no Modder River. Time and time again the accomplishments of her small and unheralded expeditions have proved that more territory can be won by beads and brass wire than by rifles and machine-guns. Not long ago I asked the governor-general of Algeria what he considered the most important factors in the remarkable spread of French influence and civilisation in North Africa, and he answered, “Public schools, the American phonograph, and the American sewing-machine.” The most casual traveller cannot but be impressed by the thoroughness with which France has “When the English occupy a country,” runs a saying which they have in Africa, “the first thing they build is a custom-house; the first thing the Germans build is a barracks; but the first thing the French build is a railway.” Nothing, indeed, is more significant of the civilising work done by the French in these almost unknown lands than the means of communication, there being in operation to-day in French Africa six thousand miles of railway, twenty-five thousand miles of telegraph, and ten thousand miles of telephone. Think of being able to buy a return ticket from Paris to Timbuktu; of telegraphing Christmas greetings to your family in Tarrytown or Back Bay or Bryn Mawr from the shores of Lake Tchad; or of sitting in the American consulate at Tamatave and chatting with a friend in Antanarivo, three hundred miles away. Why, only the other day the Sultan of Morocco, at Fez, sent birthday congratulations to the President of France, at Paris, by wireless. To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted road-bed, in an electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot and cold running water in your compartment, and with a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch of the Barbary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripolitanian frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, was the most notorious pirate stronghold in the world. A strategic line has been built six hundred miles southward from the coast city of Oran to Colomb-Bechar, in the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual destination, and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy France has more good harbours on the coasts of Africa than all the other nations put together. Algiers, with one of the finest roadsteads in the world, is now the most important coaling-station in the Mediterranean and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying between America and the Near East; by the construction of a great ship-canal the French engineers have made Tunis directly accessible to ocean-going vessels, thus restoring the maritime importance of Carthage to her successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval base will doubtless eventually be constructed there which will rival Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar the control of the entrance to the Mediterranean. With its entire western portion dominated by the great French ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles, Oran, Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the road to becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a French lake. But, though good harbours are taken rather as a matter of course in the Mediterranean, one hardly expects to find them on the reef-bordered West Coast, which is pounded by a ceaseless and merciless surf. At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from the steamer's heaving deck into a dancing surf-boat by But if the French harbours are amazingly good, the French vessels which drop anchor in them are, for the The struggle of the French colonial army to maintain law and order along the vast reaches of France's African frontiers forms one of the most thrilling and romantic chapters in the history of colonial expansion. Theirs has been a work of tact, rather than of force, for, where England, Germany, Italy, and Belgium have used the iron hand in dealing with the natives, France, more farsighted, has seen the wisdom of hiding it within the velvet glove. Always she has conciliated the Moslem. She has safeguarded the privacy of his mosques and harems; she has encouraged by government subsidies his schools and universities; instead of desecrating the tombs of his holy men, she has whitewashed them; the burnooses of the great tribal and religious chieftains are brilliant with French decorations; the native mollahs and cadis are utilised as local magistrates in all except the gravest cases or those involving a European. To attempt to govern a country without those, or against those, to whom it belonged, is a blunder of which France I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly placed and intimately informed European officials in North Africa when I assert that Germany's repeated interference with the French programme in Morocco was due as much to military as to political reasons, the Germans using this means to hinder the expansion of that mysterious force noire which has long been a bugaboo to the War Office authorities in Berlin. Whether this was the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the Moroccan business, no one knows better than the German general staff that, in the event of war, the Republic No small part in the winning of North Africa has been played by the Foreign Legion—how the name smacks of romance!—that picturesque company of adventurers, soldiers of fortune, and ne'er-do-weels, ten thousand strong, most of whom serve under the French flag in preference to serving in their own prisons. In this notorious corps the French Government enlists without question any physically fit man who applies. It asks no questions and expects to be told any number of lies. It trains them until they are as hard as nails and as tough as rawhide; it works them as a negro teamster works a Kentucky mule; it pays them wages which would cause a strike among Chinese coolies; and, when the necessity arises, it sends them into action with the assurance that there will be no French widows to be pensioned. So unenviable is the reputation of the Legionnaires that even the Algerian desert towns balk at their being stationed in the vicinity, for nothing from hen-roost to harem is safe from their depredations; so they are utilised on the most remote frontiers in time of peace and invariably form the advance guard in time of war. It is commonly said that when the Legion goes into action its officers take the precaution of marching in the rear, so as not to be shot in the back, but that is probably a libel which the regiment does not deserve. Wherever the musketry is crackling along France's colonial frontiers, there this Legion of the Several times each year it is customary for the commandants of the French posts along the edge of the Sahara to organise fantasias in honour of the Arab sheikhs of the region, who come in to attend them, followed by great retinues of burnoosed, turbaned, and splendidly mounted retainers, with the same enthusiasm with which an American countryside turns out to see the circus. At one of these affairs, held in southern Algeria, I could not but contrast the marked attentions paid by the French officials to the native chieftains with the cavalier and frequently insolent attitude invariably assumed by British officials toward Egyptians of all ranks, not even excepting the Khedive. Were a French official to affront one of the great Arab sheikhs as Lord Kitchener did the Khedive, when he exacted an apology from his Highness for presuming to criticise the discipline of the Sudanese troops, he would be fortunate indeed if he escaped summary dismissal. At the fantasia in question luxuriously furnished tents had been erected for the comfort of the native guests; a champagne luncheon provided the excuse for innumerable protestations of friendship; a series of races with money prizes was arranged for the visitors' horses; and, before leaving, the sheikhs were presented with ornate saddles, gold-mounted rifles, and, in the Not content with these periodic manifestations of friendship, the French Government makes it a point occasionally to invite the native rulers of the lands under its control to visit France as the guests of the nation. Escorted by French officers who can talk with them in their own tongue, these colonial visitors in their outlandish costumes are shown the delights of Montmartre by night, they are dined by the President of the Republic at the ÉlysÉe, they are given the freedom of Paris at the HÔtel de Ville, and they finally return to their own lands the friends and allies of France for the rest of their lives. “It doesn't cost the government much,” an official of the French Colonial Office once remarked to me, À propos of a visit then being paid to Paris by the King of Cambodia, “and it tickles the niggers.” Straggling down here and there into the desert from some of the North African coast towns go the trade Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly influences the surrounding regions, just as the Atlantic Ocean influences the countries which border on it. Were commerce to be seriously interrupted upon the Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably result in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland ocean. Ever since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba brought gifts to King Solomon, ever since Abraham France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has been remarkably free from obstructions, for, barring the Algerian campaign of 1830, and the German-created incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her vast domain—close on half the total area of the continent—at a There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic history in this connection. The story has been told me by both French and British officials—and there is good reason to believe that it is true—that the French Government had planned, in case Marchand was able to hold his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert the waters of the White Nile, at a point near its junction with the Sobat River, into the Sahara, an undertaking which, owing to the physical characteristics of that region, would, so the French engineers claimed, have been entirely feasible. France would thus have accomplished the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert territory and of turning Egypt into a desert by diverting her only supply of water; for this, remember, was in those bitter, jealous days before the Anglo-French entente. It was, indeed, the intelligence that the Khalifa proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to her knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition to be pushed forward so rapidly. (I should add that the idea, once so popular in France, of turning the Sahara into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable, if not Because the map-makers from time beyond reckoning have seen fit to paint the northern half of the African continent a speckled yellow, most of us have been accustomed to look upon this region as an arid, sun-baked, worthless desert. But French explorers, French engineers, and French scientists have proved that it is very far from being worthless or past reclamation. M. Henri Schirmer, the latest and most careful student of its problems, says: “The sterility of the Sahara is due neither to the form of the land nor to its nature. The alluvium of sand, chalk, and gypsum which covers the Algerian Sahara constitutes equally the soil of the most fertile plains in the world. What causes the misery of one and the wealth of the other is the absence or the presence of water.” Now, an extensive series It should be borne in mind, in any discussion of North Africa, that until the early '80's the Great American Desert was as primitive, waterless, and sparsely settled a region as the Sahara. Its scattered inhabitants practised irrigation and agriculture very much as the people of southern Algeria and Tunisia do to-day, and, like them, they constructed buildings of unburnt brick and stone. Though the Indian was able to find a meagre sustenance upon the American desert, just as the Arab does upon the African, it was of a kind upon which the white man could not well exist. The unconquered Apaches plundered wagon-trains and mail-coaches just as the Tuareg occasionally plunders the Then the railways came to the American West, just as they are coming to North Africa to-day, and the desert was awakened from its lethargy of centuries by the shriek of the locomotive. The first railroads to be constructed were designed primarily as highways between the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, with hardly a thought of revenue from the desert itself. But hard on the heels of the railway-builders followed the miners and the cattlemen, so that to-day the iron highway across the desert is bordered by prosperous cities and villages, by mines and oil-derricks and ranches and white farm-houses with green blinds, this one-time arid region, which the wiseheads of thirty years ago pronounced worthless, now yielding a wealth twice as much per capita as that of any other portion of the United States. What has already been accomplished in the American desert, French brains, French energy, and French machinery are fast accomplishing in the Sahara. Thanks to the recent invention, by a non-commissioned officer of France's African forces, of a six-wheeled motor-sledge driven by a light but powerful aeroplane engine, the problem of rapid communication in these desert An oasis, by the way, does not necessarily consist, as the reading public seems to believe, of a clump of palm-trees beside a brackish well, many of them being great stretches of well-watered and cultivated soil, sometimes many square miles in extent, and rich in fig, pomegranate, orange, apricot, and olive trees. The oasis of Kaouer, for example, with its one hundred thousand The story of French success in the exploration, the civilisation, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa is one of the wonder-tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than on those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable, for where England's possessions have largely been gained by punitive expeditions, France has won hers by pacific penetration. Look at Senegambia If French Africa becomes in time a rich and prosperous dominion—and I firmly believe that it will—it is to her patient and intrepid pioneers of civilisation—-desert patrols, railway-builders, well-drillers, school-teachers, commercial investigators—that the thanks of the nation will be due; for they are pointing the way to millions of natives, on whose activities and necessities the commercial development of Africa must eventually depend. So I trust that those at home in France will give all honour to the men at work in the Sahara, the Senegal, and the Sudan or rotting in the weed-grown, snake-infested cemeteries of the Congo and Somaliland; men whose battles have been fought out in steaming jungles or on lonely oases, far away from home and friends and often from another white man's help and sympathy; sometimes with savage desert raiders, or in action against Hausa, Berber, or Moor; but oftenest of all with an unseen and deadlier foe—the dread African fever. |