Let us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that she has made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which represents one of the most successful of those operations of colonial expansion which have marked her history during the last forty years. What has been the precise effect on French prosperity? In thirty years, at a cost of many millions (it is part of successful colonial administration in France never to let it be known what the Colonies really cost), France has founded in Tunis a Colony, in which to-day there are, excluding soldiers and officials, about 25,000 genuine French colonists; just the number by which the French population in France--the real France--is diminishing every year! And the value of Tunis as a market does not even amount to the sum which France spends directly on its occupation and administration, to say nothing of the indirect extension of military burdens which its conquest involved; and, of course, the market which it represents would still exist in some form, though England--or even Germany--administered the country. In other words, France loses every year in her home population a Colony equivalent to Tunis--if we measure Colonies in terms of communities made up of the race which has sprung from the Mother Country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and diplomats can point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially and exotically under conditions which must in the long-run be inimical to their race, it is pointed to as "expansion" and as evidence that France is maintaining her position as a Great Power. In a few years, as history goes, unless there is some complete change in tendencies, which at present seem as strong as ever, the French race, as we know it, will have ceased to exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by the Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are to-day more Germans in France than there are Frenchmen in all the Colonies that France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French Colonies. France is to-day a better Colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic Colony which France owns. "They _tell_ me," said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite original _mot_), "that the Germans are at Agadir. I _know_ they are in the Champs-Elysées." Which, of course, is in reality a much more serious matter. On the other side we are to assume that Germany has during the period of France's expansion,--since the war--not expanded at all. That she has been throttled and cramped--that she has not had her place in the sun; and that is why she must fight for it and endanger the security of her neighbors.