was accompanied by a settlement of the old disputes about French fishing rights in Newfoundland, and of more recent difficulties concerning the frontiers between French and English possessions in West Africa.[12] The whole group formed a step in a general policy, on both sides, of healing local controversies which had little meaning except as instruments of diplomatic warfare.  The agreement regarding Egypt and Morocco is distinguished from that concerning West Africa and Newfoundland in so far as it recognizes the possibility of objections on the part of other Powers.  It promised mutual support in the case of such objections; but not the support of armed force, only that of diplomatic influence.

At the moment of these agreements Count Buelow told the Reichstag that Germany had no objection, as her interests were in no way imperilled by them.  Later, however, Germany chose to regard the Moroccan settlement as an injury or an insult or both.  In the following year the Kaiser made a speech at Tangier (March, 1905) in which he asserted that he would uphold the important commercial and industrial interests of Germany in Morocco, and that he would never allow any other Power to step between him and the free sovereign of a free country.  It was subsequently announced in the German Press that Germany had no objection to the Anglo-French Agreement in itself, but objected to not having been consulted before it was arranged.  This complaint was met, on the part of France, by the retirement of M. Delcasse, her Minister of Foreign Affairs, and by her assent to an International Conference regarding Morocco.  The Conference met at Algeciras, and German pretensions were satisfied by an international Agreement.[13] It is to be observed that in this Conference the original claims of Germany were opposed, not only by Russia, from whom she could hardly expect sympathy, but even by Italy, her own ally.  When Germany had finally assented to the Agreement, her Chancellor, in flat contradiction with his previous utterance ’that German interests were in no way imperilled by it’, announced that Germany had been compelled to intervene by her economic interests, by the prestige of German policy, and by the dignity of the German Empire.

The plain fact was that Germany, soon after the conclusion of the Anglo-French agreements, had found herself suddenly delivered from her preoccupations on the side of Russia, and had seized the opportunity to assert herself in the West while Russia was involved in the most critical stage of her struggle with Japan.  But this war came to an end before the Convention of Algeciras had begun; and Russia, even in the hour of defeat and internal revolutions, was still too formidable to be overridden, when she ranged herself beside her Western ally.