The ownership of this splendid port was for many years in dispute between this country and the Portuguese, with whose dominions of Mozambique it is connected by a strip of coast, and who have a small fort upon it. This dispute was finally referred by Lord Granville in 1872 to the decision of Marshal MacMahon, and on this occasion, as on every other in which this country has been weak enough to go to arbitration, that decision was given against us. Into the merits of the case it is not necessary to enter, further than to say, as has already been recently pointed out by a very able and well-informed correspondent of the _Morning Post_, that it is by no means clear by what right the matter was referred to arbitration at all. The Amatongas are in possession of the southern shore of the bay, including, I believe, the Inyack Peninsula and Inyack Island, and they are an independent people. The Swazis also abut on it, and they are independent. What warrant had we to refer their rights to the arbitration of Marshal MacMahon? The evidence of the exercise of any Portuguese sovereignty over these countries is so shadowy that it may be said never to have existed; certainly it does not exist now. This is a point, but it is nothing more. We must take things as we find them, and we find that the Portuguese have been formally declared and admitted by us to be the owners of Delagoa Bay. Now, so long as we held the Transvaal it did not so much matter who had the sovereignty of the Bay, since a railway constructed from there could only run to British territory. But we gave up the Transvaal, which is now virtually a hostile state, and the contingency which has been so long foreseen in South Africa, and so blindly overlooked at home, has come to pass--the railway is in course of rapid completion. What does this mean to us? At the best, it means that we lose the greater part of the trade of South-eastern Africa; at the worst, that we lose it all. In other words, it means, putting aside the question of our Imperial needs and status in Africa, a great many millions a year in hard cash out of the national pocket. Let us suppose that the worst happens, and that the Germans get a footing either in the Transvaal or Delagoa Bay. Obviously they will stop our trade in favour of their own. Or let us suppose that the Transvaal takes advantage of one of our spasms of Imperial paralysis, such as afflicted us during the _régime_ of Lord Derby, and defies the provision in the convention which forbids them to put a heavier tax upon our goods than upon those of any other nation. In either event our case would be a bad one, for our road from the eastern coast to the vast interior is blocked. But it is of little use crying over spilt milk, or anticipating evils which it is our duty to try to avert, and which in all probability still could be averted by a sound and consistent policy.