“Why have we not been able to secure the Santa Lucia Bay?” I asked.  “Ah!” he replied, “it is not so valuable as it seemed to be at first.  People who were pursuing their own interests on the spot represented it to be of greater importance than it really was.  And then the Boers were not disposed to take any proper action in the matter.  The bay would have been valuable to us if the distance from the Transvaal were not so great.  And the English attached so much importance to it that they declared it was impossible for them to give it up, and they ultimately conceded a great deal to us in New Guinea and Zanzibar.  In colonial matters we must not take too much in hand at a time, and we already have enough for a beginning.  We must now hold rather with the English, while, as you know, we were formerly more on the French side[444].  But, as the last elections in France show, every one of any importance there had to make a show of hostility to us.”

[Footnote 443:  Parl.  Papers, Africa, No. 6 (1885), p. 2.]

[Footnote 444:  He here referred to the Franco-German agreement of Dec. 24, 1885, whereby the two Powers amicably settled the boundaries of their West African lands, and Germany agreed not to thwart French designs on Tahiti, the Society Isles, the New Hebrides, etc.  See Banning, Le Partage politique de l’Afrique, pp. 22-26.]

This passage explains, in part at least, why Bismarck gave up the nagging tactics latterly employed towards Great Britain.  Evidently he had hoped to turn the current of thought in France from the Alsace-Lorraine question to the lands over the seas, and his henchmen in the Press did all in their power to persuade people, both in Germany and France, that England was the enemy.  The Anglophobe agitation was fierce while it lasted; but its artificiality is revealed by the passage just quoted.

We may go further, and say that the more recent outbreak of Anglophobia in Germany may probably be ascribed to the same official stimulus; and it too may be expected to cease when the politicians of Berlin see that it no longer pays to twist the British lion’s tail.  That sport ceased in and after 1886, because France was found still to be the enemy.  Frenchmen did not speak much about Alsace-Lorraine.  They followed Gambetta’s advice:  “Never speak about it, but always think of it.”  The recent French elections revealed that fact to Bismarck; and, lo! the campaign of calumny against England at once slackened.

We may add that two German traders settled on the coast of Pondoland, south of Natal; and in August 1885 the statesmen of Berlin put forth feelers to Whitehall with a view to a German Protectorate of that coast.  They met with a decisive repulse[445].

[Footnote 445:  Cape Colony, Papers on Pondoland, 1887, pp. 1, 41.  For the progress of German South-West Africa and East Africa, see Parl.  Papers, Germany, Nos. 474, 528, 2790.]