Having thus solidified their position, and secured themselves against what Passarge calls “the intrigues and provocations of the English,” the German administrators proceeded to Germanize their new province and systematically to develop its tropical resources. Although they established customs houses, courts of justice and post-offices, and constructed about 125 miles of a projected railway system of 285 miles, and, between 1898 and 1911, increased the total trade of the colony by nearly forty million marks, the colony did not prove a departmental or material success. The staffs of the Experimental Institute of Agriculture at Victoria and the Department of Agriculture at Buea, devoted their energies to the scientific raising of tropical economic plants, to experiments in plantation culture, and to the training of young natives in the virtues of Teutonic industry and organisation, while, by Government Proclamation, all native children were compelled to attend the Government schools, acquire an intelligent knowledge of the language and history of Germany, and practice the art of singing German patriotic songs. Despite this paternal concern for the agricultural and educational well-being of the natives, the application of German methods proved a disappointment. The children at the end of their school course considered themselves too superior to undertake manual labour, while the men, resenting the German indifference to their national feeling and inherited methods of work, developed the spirit of native unrest. A lack of sympathetic understanding of the natives was attended by culpably injudicious treatment of them by the German officials, and the relations between the authorities and the aborigines led to the frequent employment of the Imperial troops, while the inadequacy of means of internal communication rendered the progress of “one of the most productive countries in the world” both slow and difficult. But, disappointing and costly as was the German failure to administer and develop the Cameroons, the Teutonic lust for territory was unabated, and, in its resolve to extend its holding in this quarter of the globe, the Government did not hesitate to emperil the peace of Europe. When the German cruiser _Panther_ appeared at Agadir, in July, 1911, the object of the Wilhelmstrasse was not to protect purely imaginary German interests in that part of Morocco, but to maintain a menacing attitude that would compel the French to cede to the Bully of Europe their territory to the south of the German Cameroons. The negotiations for the transfer were concluded in June, 1913, and fifteen months later French and British troops commenced a joint expedition to wrest from the German authority, by military means, the province from which the former had been ejected by diplomatic blackmail and the insistant rattle of the sword in the scabbard.