The convention of 1904 was on the whole more advantageous for England than for France. The free hand which England conceded to France in dealing with Morocco was a somewhat burdensome gift owing to German interference; but the incidents which arose from the Franco-German conflict in that country are as yet too recent for any estimate of their possible consequences. The work of M. Delcasse. One result was the retirement of M. Delcasse from the foreign office on the 6th of June 1905. He had been foreign minister for seven years, a consecutive period of rare length, only once exceeded in England since the creation of the office, when Castlereagh held it for ten years, and one of prodigious duration in the history of the Third Republic. He first went to the Quai d'Orsay in the Brisson ministry of June 1898, remained there during the Dupuy ministry of the same year, was reappointed by M. Waldeck-Rousseau in his cabinet which lasted from June 1899 to June 1902, was retained in the post by M. Combes till his ministry fell in January 1905, and again by his successor M. Rouvier till his own resignation in June of that year. M. Delcasse had thus an uninterrupted reign at the foreign office during a long critical period of transition both in the interior politics of France and in its exterior relations. He went to the Quai d'Orsay when the Dreyfus agitation was most acute, and left it when parliament was absorbed in discussing the separation of church and state. He saw the Franco-Russian alliance lose its popularity in the country even before the Russian defeat by the Japanese in the last days of his ministry. Although in the course of his official duties at the colonial office he had been partly responsible for some of the expeditions sent to Africa for the purpose of checking British influence, he was fully disposed to pursue a policy which might lead to a friendly understanding with England. In this he differed from M. Hanotaux, who was essentially the man of the Franco-Russian alliance, owing to it much of his prestige, including his election to the French Academy, and Russia, to which he gave exclusive allegiance, was then deemed to be primarily the enemy of England. M. Delcasse on the contrary, from the first, desired to assist a _rapprochement_ between England and Russia as preliminary to the arrangement he proposed between England and France. He was foreign minister when the tsar paid his second visit to France, but there was no longer the national unanimity which welcomed him in 1896, M. Delcasse also accompanied President Loubet to Russia when he returned the tsar's second visit in 1902. But exchange of compliments between France and Russia were no longer to be the sole international ceremonials within the attributes of the French foreign office; M. Delcasse was minister when the procession of European sovereigns headed by the kings of England and of Italy in 1903 came officially to Paris, and he went with M.