The Belgian public learnt with painful surprise of the German designs on the Congo State, and the Press gave free utterance to its anger and its dismay. Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter was exceedingly vexed, not only at Belgian comment on his demands, but at the fact that they had been made known to us at all. He did not hide his annoyance from my predecessor, but vented it with a good deal of bluster, and consciously exaggerated his fears, after our display of feeling, for the future good relations between the two countries. It was thus that Belgium, while quietly pursuing her work of colonial development, became involved in the dispute arising out of the Agadir affair. The effect of the German claims on Morocco was felt, like the shock from some distant explosion, in the Congo basin, where we were to be faced at two points with a neighbour whose cupidity and daring gave us good cause to be uneasy. That our apprehensions were well grounded is, I think, fairly clear from my account, in another chapter, of the African policy approved by official circles in Berlin. VII. “You are the masters in Morocco,” the Chancellor had said to the French ambassador, after the signing of the Convention.[13] Was this really true? Would the German public endorse the statement? It had expected something very different from a recognition of French suzerainty. It had anticipated a partition of Morocco between France and Germany; the latter would have obtained the fertile southern regions washed by the Atlantic. The more the discussions were drawn out, breeding an excitement which the most trivial episode might have changed into war-fever, the stronger grew the hope of a partition. To dream of a colony, rich in natural resources of every kind, and to wake up amid the swamps of the Sanga and the Oubanghi—what a disillusion! And Germany, on her side, was ceding some territories in the region of Lake Tchad! Public opinion, now that its eyes were opened, turned its wrath against the unwilling author of this “sell.” No one was more unpopular in Germany, during the autumn of 1911, than the ill-starred Kiderlen-Wächter. After the Agadir coup, which had a faint Bismarckian touch about it, too much reliance had been placed on his shrewdness and energy; and now came the reaction. Not only was German diplomacy pilloried by the whole bourgeois Press and scornfully compared with that of France, but even in the Reichstag the galling Convention of November 4th was spoken of in terms that suggested a national humiliation.