By the late winter of 1926 France and Spain, by a lavish expenditure of their resources, had enveloped the Riff in a wall of steel, employing every device of scientific warfare against the embattled tribesmen. Even the Riffi recognized that further resistance was futile; the tribal chieftains, either bought up by French and Spanish gold or to save their skins, began to fall away from Abd-el-Krim, and before spring had turned to summer that gallant fighter came riding astride a mule into the French lines. The authority of his Shereefian Majesty the Prince of True Believers had been upheld; the tyranny of Spain in the Riff had been perpetuated; and France had won what the newspapers of Paris proclaimed _une victoire glorieuse_. But I imagine that those who viewed it, as I did, at close range and through glasses unclouded by rancor or propaganda, thought it a rather sorry triumph. Could France acquire the Riff from Spain—as there is no question that she would like to do—and extend over that region the just and beneficent rule which she has given to her own protectorate in Morocco, there is no doubt that it would be the best thing for every one concerned, the Riffi themselves included. And there is good reason to believe that at one period of the conflict, when the gloom of discouragement and threatened bankruptcy hung like a cloud over Spain, some such solution was under serious consideration by the Madrid government. But it was here that England stepped in. To France’s present position in Morocco Great Britain has no objection; indeed, she made it possible through the pacts she signed in London and at Algeciras. But to a French Morocco which came down to the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly to a French Morocco which included the great fortress at Ceuta, the statesmen of Downing Street have the most unalterable objections. Ceuta, as you will see by glancing at the map, is vis-à-vis to Gibraltar. And Gibraltar, because of recent developments in warfare—particularly the airplane, the submarine, poison gas, and long-range guns—is no longer so impregnable as the British War Office and the Prudential Insurance Company would like the world to suppose. Situated on a peninsula, with Spain at its back, it is cut off from reinforcements save by sea, and it lacks, moreover, a suitable terrain for the effective use of airplanes. Ceuta, which is naturally even stronger than the Rock, and which could be made absolutely impregnable by military engineers, is on the mainland, with all of Africa from which to draw supplies and reinforcements, and it possesses the other military facilities which its great British rival lacks. In the hands of Spain, a second-rate power with few colonial ambitions and no navy worthy of the name, Ceuta is not the slightest menace to Britain. But let it pass into the possession of France, let it be fortified and armed by French engineers, let strategic railways be brought up to its