The other day two suave, frock-coated gentlemen, seated at a green-covered table in the Foreign Office in Berlin, by putting their names to the bottom of a piece of parchment, caused a territory almost as large as the State of Texas to become French, and another territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to become German. About as many people were affected, though not consulted, by that international dicker—which has passed into history as the Morocco-Equatoria Convention—as there are in the county of London. The lot of about four-fifths of these people will doubtless be materially improved, and in a few years, if they have any gratitude in their Moorish souls, they will be thanking Allah for having given them French instead of Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese blacks who compose the other fifth, they will soon find, unless I am very much mistaken, that the red-white-and-black flag stands for something very different from the red-white-and-blue one, and that the stiff-backed, guttural-tongued German officers in their tight-fitting uniforms will prove sterner masters than the easy-going French _administrateurs_ in their topées and white linen. Now the significance of that convention does not lie in its ethics—which are very questionable; nor in the territory and population and resources concerned—which are very great; but in the fact that it brings within reasonable measure of fulfilment the imperial dream which William II began dreaming some seven and twenty years ago, and which he recently translated to the world in the declaration “Germany's future lies oversea.” In those four words is found the foreign policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of Morocco and ended with Germany's acquirement of a material addition to her African domain was not, as the world supposes, an example of the haphazard land-grabbing so popular with European nations, but a single phase of a vast and carefully laid scheme whose aim is the creation of a new and greater Germany oversea—a _Deutschland über Meer_.