Every step in France’s African policy during the last half-century has been as carefully considered as the moves in a championship chess-game. The ultimate effect on the grand plan of every military movement, every expedition, every rectification of a frontier, every treaty, has been meticulously weighed and pondered in advance. They have all been parts of a sagacious and brilliantly executed scheme; nothing has been left to chance. There has been none of the “muddling through” which characterized the British policy in South Africa; little of the stupidity and blundering which marked our winning of the West. The French conquest has been marred by no petty or selfish or contradictory aims; it has been hampered by no irresolution, no moving forward and then turning back; energy in one quarter has not been counteracted by indifference in another; patriotism has not been subordinated to politics. Since the conquest of Algeria, moreover, France’s course of empire in Africa has been obstructed by no great colonial wars and few wars of any kind; she has had no Indian Mutinies, no Adowas, no Omdurmans, no Modder Rivers. Wherever possible she has employed a process of pacific penetration—winning the confidence of the tribes instead of threatening them, granting broad measures of autonomy to the great sheikhs and the grand caïds, flattering their vanity with salutes, rewards, and decorations. The social gulf which separates the British officials in Egypt, the Sudan, and India from the native chieftains is unknown in French Africa, for the French tolerate neither racial discrimination nor the color-line.