In 1911 Germany, in return for acknowledging a French Protectorate over Morocco, obtained from France important territorial advantages in French Congo—about 107,000 square miles—giving Germany (1) a strip on the south of Corisco Bay and a large piece of the Osheba country, which permits her to surround the Spanish possession of Rio Muni (she also acquired from France rights of pre-emption over the Rio Muni); (2) a long strip down the valley of the river Sanga to the main Congo River opposite Lukolela; (3) the Laka and Baya countries east of the Cameroons watershed; and (4) a strip of land communicating with the Mubangi river. In return, Germany ceded to France a piece of land (6450 sq. miles) along the left bank of the lower Shari. It was generally rumoured that Germany had asked for the whole left bank of the Mubangi from Libenge down to the Congo, and the whole of French Congo between the Mubangi, the Congo and the Atlantic coast. If she did so, other circumstances caused her to modify her demands. In any case she has succeeded in cutting off French Congo from the Mubangi-Shari-Chad territories, so far as uninterrupted land communication is concerned. She has ringed the tree in the hope that it may some day fall to her. But if it does, it will only be in return for an equivalent in some other direction, perhaps a rectification of the Lorraine frontier. Even with the loss of her Gaboon-West Congo territory, France would still possess a magnificent and compact African Empire exceeding in extent that of any other European Power, or at any rate superior in continuous area—an empire of something like 3,100,000 square miles, stretching from Senegal and Morocco to the frontiers of Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan, from Algiers and Carthage to the Belgian Congo and the vicinity of Uganda; besides her valuable foothold on the Gulf of Aden, and the possession of Madagascar (presently to be described), which compensates her for the want of colonies in South and East Africa. In the regions north of the Mubangi-Wele—a river which Germans, Englishmen and Belgians were the first to discover, but the whole of the north bank of which from the Mbomu confluence to the Congo confluence is now owned by France—Frenchmen have reason to be proud of their country’s record. As already related, it was French explorers who first solved the mystery of the passage from the Congo watershed to that of the Shari-Chad; and several French explorers paid with their lives for their temerity. To enquire into and avenge the death of Paul Crampel, a French commissioner, Emile Gentil (subsequently, until 1908, Governor of French Congo) had penetrated down the Shari River, from the Congo basin, till he had reached the far-famed country of Bagirmi. Here he induced the