Zanzibar ought not to have been left to the English.  It would have been better to maintain the old arrangement.  We could then have had it at some later time when England required our good offices against France or Russia.  In the meantime our merchants, who are cleverer, and, like the Jews, are satisfied with smaller profits, would have kept the upper hand in business.  To regard Heligoland as an equivalent shows more imagination than sound calculation.  In the event of war it would be better for us that it should be in the hands of a neutral Power.  It is difficult and most expensive to fortify[435].

[Footnote 434:  Parl.  Papers, Africa, No. 6 (1890).]

[Footnote 435:  Bismarck:  Some Secret Pages of his History, vol. iii. p. 353.  See, too, S. Whitman, Personal Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck, p. 122.]

The passage is instructive as showing the aim of Bismarck’s colonial policy, namely, to wait until England’s difficulties were acute (or perhaps to augment those difficulties, as he certainly did by furthering Russian schemes against Afghanistan in 1884-85[436]), and then to apply remorseless pressure at all points where the colonial or commercial interests of the two countries clashed.

[Footnote 436:  Bismarck:  Some Secret Pages of his History, vol. iii. pp. 124, 133:  also see p. 426 of this work.]

The more his policy is known, the more dangerous to England it is seen to have been, especially in the years 1884-86.  In fact, those persons who declaim against German colonial ambitions of to-day may be asked to remember that the extra-European questions recently at issue between Great Britain and Germany are trivial when compared with the momentous problems that were peacefully solved by the agreement of the year 1890.  Of what importance are Samoa, Kiao-chow, and the problem of Morocco, compared with the questions of access to the great lakes of Africa and the control of the Lower Niger?  It would be unfair to Wilhelm II., as also to the Salisbury Cabinet, not to recognise the statesmanlike qualities which led to the agreement of July 1, 1890—­one of the most solid gains peacefully achieved for the cause of civilisation throughout the nineteenth century.

Among its many benefits may be reckoned the virtual settlement of long and tangled disputes for supremacy in Uganda.  We have no space in which to detail the rivalries of French and British missionaries and agents at the Court of King M’tesa and his successor M’wanga, or the futile attempt of Dr. Peters to thrust in German influence.  Even the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 did not end the perplexities of the situation; for though the British East Africa Company (to which a charter had been granted in 1888) thenceforth had the chief influence on the northern shores of Victoria Nyanza, the British Government declined to assume any direct responsibility for so inaccessible a district.  Thanks, however, to the activity and tact of Captain Lugard, difficulties were cleared away, with the result that the large and fertile territory of Uganda (formerly included in the Khedive’s dominions) became a British Protectorate in August 1894 (see Chapter XVII).