Heretofore Germany has been in much the same predicament as a boy who tries to put a picture puzzle together when some of the pieces are missing. In Germany's case the missing pieces were held by England, France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give them up. If you will open the family atlas to the map of Africa, you will see that Germany's four colonies on that continent are so widely separated that their consolidation is apparently out of the question. Northernmost of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pestilential coast-line variously named and noted for its slaves, its ivory, and its gold, and aptly called “the rottenest coast in the world,” is the colony of Togo. Approximately the size of Cuba and rich in native products, it is so remote from the other German possessions that its only value is in providing Germany with a _quid pro quo_ which she can use in negotiating for some territory more desirable. In the right angle formed by the Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich, fertile, and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size of Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to Lake Tchad, it has hitherto been destitute of good harbours or navigable rivers, being barred from the Niger by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until the recent territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa. Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to the southward and you will come to German Southwest Africa, a barren, inhospitable, sparsely populated land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far inland as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the continent, just south of the Equator, lies German East Africa, almost twice the size of the mother country and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's transmarine possessions. The combined area of these four colonies is equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi put together; certainly a substantial foundation on which to begin the erection of an empire, especially when it is remembered that French Africa, which now comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the most part the work of but a single generation.