"The other point to which it is necessary to advert is the proposed recognition of the French claim to the northern and eastern shores of Lake Chad. If other questions are adjusted, Her Majesty's Government will make no difficulty about this condition. But in doing so they cannot forget that the possession of this territory may in the future open up a road to the Nile; and they must not be understood to admit that any other European Power than Great Britain has any claim to occupy any part of the Valley of the Nile. The views of the British Government upon this matter were plainly stated in Parliament by Sir Edward Grey some years ago during the Administration of the Earl of Rosebery, and were formally communicated to the French Government at the time. Her Majesty's present Government entirely adhere to the language that was on this occasion employed by their predecessors." To this M. Hanotaux replied:-- "In any case the French Government cannot, under present circumstances, refrain from repeating the reservations which it has never failed to express every time that questions relating to the Valley of the Nile have been brought forward. Thus, in particular, the declarations of Sir Edward Grey, to which the British Government has referred, gave rise to an immediate protest by our representative in London, the terms of which he repeated and developed in the further conversations which he had at the Foreign Office on the subject. I myself had occasion, in the sitting of the Senate on April 5, 1895, to make, in the name of the Government, declarations to which I consider that I am all the more justified in referring from the fact that they have called forth no reply from the British Government." The speech to which M. Hanotaux refers is published at length in an appendix, and, so far from being a reply to Sir Edward Grey, it gives the French position completely away.