This is another instance of the strange features which now and again attend German colonization, good as well as bad. Their authorities had apparently entirely forgotten the regrettable Wilhelmsthal affair, but probably the real reason was that this incident (which many Englishmen will not readily forget) was regarded by them as altogether too trivial to be noticed. This unfortunate affair—though in some respects comparatively unimportant, yet in reality a grave matter—certainly merits a permanent record in some form, because it is just one of those blundering incidents which bring in their train a whole crop of labour difficulties. [Sidenote: AN ANGLO-GERMAN INCIDENT] A German Railway Construction Company had been allowed to recruit British Kaffir subjects from South Africa. In the autumn of 1910 trouble arose because deductions were made from the labourers’ wages, and they further complained of bad food and housing. The Railway authorities seem to have then embittered the situation by refusing to allow the men food and water. This conduct in a tropical country was little, if at all, short of inhuman, and the labourers naturally struck work and apparently assumed a somewhat threatening attitude. The situation was then handled in a style characteristically German. The Company itself, ignoring the civil authorities, called in the troops, who shot seven of these British subjects in cold blood and wounded several others. How one-sided the whole affair was is demonstrated by the fact that not a single German soldier was even injured. This incident, from every point of view an outrage, was regarded as so trivial that no one appears to have been punished, nor so far as we know has any compensation been paid to the wounded or to the relatives of the murdered Kaffirs. German colonial knowledge of British public opinion cannot be of a very far-reaching nature when it ignores this incident in asking for British labour to develop its colonies. To Englishmen it cannot be a matter of surprise that the India Office has not yet granted permission to recruit labour from the Indian Empire. Germany and Belgium are the only two Powers in West Africa which do not possess colonies in other parts of the world from which to recruit labour, hence they are dependent upon other Powers. To the proud German Empire, this situation is irritating, while Great Britain, France, and also Portugal, to a limited extent, can each of them augment the labour force of any given colony by recruiting from their other colonial possessions.