moves against the Queen’s Empire in Asia.  We do not know enough of what then went on between the German and Russian Chancellors to assert that they formed a definite agreement to harry British interests in those continents; but, judging from the general drift of Bismarck’s diplomacy and from the “nagging” to which England was thenceforth subjected for two years, it seems highly probable that the policy ratified at Skiernevice aimed at marking time in European affairs and striding onwards in other continents at the expense of the Island Power.

The Anglophobes of the German press at once fell foul of everything British; and that well-known paper the Koelnische Zeitung in an article of April 22, 1884, used the following words:—­“Africa is a large pudding which the English have prepared for themselves at other people’s expense, and the crust of which is already fit for eating.  Let us hope that our sailors will put a few pepper-corns into it on the Guinea coast, so that our friends on the Thames may not digest it too rapidly.”  The sequel will show whether the simile correctly describes either the state of John Bull’s appetite or the easy aloofness of the Teutonic onlooker.

It will be convenient to treat this great and complex subject on a topographical basis, and to begin with a survey of the affairs of East Africa, especially the districts on the mainland north and south of the island of Zanzibar.  At that important trade centre, the natural starting point then for the vast district of the Great Lakes, the influence of British and Indian traders had been paramount; and for many years the Sultan of Zanzibar had been “under the direct influence of the United Kingdom and of the Government of India[426].”  Nevertheless, in and after 1880 German merchants, especially those of Hamburg, pressed in with great energy and formed plans for annexing the neighbouring territories on the mainland.

[Footnote 426:  Parl.  Papers, Africa, No. 1 (1886), p. 2.]

Their energy was in strange contrast to the lethargy shown by the British Government in the protection of Anglo-Indian trade interests.  In the year 1878 the Sultan of Zanzibar, who held a large territory on the mainland, had offered the control of all the commerce of his dominions to Sir W. Mackinnon, Chairman of the British-India Steam Navigation Company; but, for some unexplained reason, the Beaconsfield Cabinet declined to be a party to this arrangement, which, therefore, fell through[427].  Despite the fact that England and France had in 1862 agreed to recognise the independence of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the Germans deemed the field to be clear, and early in November 1884, Dr. Karl Peters and two other enthusiasts of the colonial party landed at Zanzibar, disguised as mechanics, with the aim of winning new lands for their Fatherland.  They had with them several blank treaty forms, the hidden potency of which was soon to be felt by dusky potentates on the mainland.  Before