The French colonial government covers an empire in Indo-China similar to that of Great Britain in India, and would like to annex not only Anam, but Cambodia and Eastern Siam. Early in this century, at the instigation of Roman Catholic missionaries, who have played an important part in the political complications, the French assisted Gialong, an Anamese aspirant to the throne, making their services the basis of a treaty which virtually gave them the protectorate of the whole eastern coast. This claim, being disputed by the successors of the prince, was the pretext for further encroachments. The court of Hué, too weak to resist, again and again memorialized the Chinese government, and each time a strong protest was made by China, who naturally objected to a foreign power holding the trade-keys of some of her richest provinces. These remonstrances have been ignored, and the frank statement of Dr. Hammand, the French civil commissioner in Tonquin, is not calculated to commend Christian ethics to the Buddhists of Southern Asia. “When a European nation,” he affirms, “comes in contact with a barbarous people, and has begun to spread around its civilizing influences, there comes a time when it becomes _ipso facto_ a necessity to extend its boundaries. There is no country more favorable to our development than the kingdom of Anam. The Anamese recognize that we are incontestably their superiors. _It is necessary to force Anam to accept our rule._” This has been done. An able writer in the _London Quarterly_ (October, 1883) says: “The railroad route from Maulmein across the Chino-Shan frontier being assured, an upland cross-road of some seventy or eighty miles north-east would lead to Yuan-Kiang on the main stream of the Songkoi, whence a road would lie open to the capital, Yunnan-fu, or south to the mart of Manhao, which is the head wharf of the Songkoi River navigation within the province of Yunnan, and thence to the Gulf of Tonquin.… Siam, the Laos provinces tributary and independent, Yunnan and Tonquin can thus be brought into the closest and most profitable connection with Burmah, all on one line, at once the easiest and most expeditious across the peninsula, and thus a short direct line for goods-transit be provided from the Gulf of Tonquin to the Bay of Bengal.… This, then, is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx of the Far East, this the true solution of the Indo-Chinese overland route problem; by this the long-sought goal will be obtained, and the highest benefits conferred, not on Burmah and Yunnan only, but on India and China; on Siam and the Laos country, and Tonquin; on British and European enterprise throughout the China Sea and Indian Ocean alike――the vision of Marco Polo and his gallant successors realized.”