While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions one step farther and take it for granted that Portugal could be induced to dispose of her great west-coast colony of Angola, to which Germany already possesses the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps another Agadir performance, based on some easily found pretext and backed up by German war-ships in the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government to hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, to the Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its government is weak and vacillating, and a long list of failures has left the people with little stomach for colonisation. The Portuguese Republic has few friends among the monarchical nations of Europe and could count on scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It is asserted in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on the Morocco-Equatoria Convention was scarcely dry before the German minister in Lisbon had opened secret _pourparlers_ with the Portuguese Foreign Office with a view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast colony of Mozambique.[5] The acquisition of Angola would supply Germany with the final link needed to unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa, thus giving her an African empire second in size only to that of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this may sound, I have but roughly sketched for you that imperial dream for whose fulfilment the Kaiser and his people are indefatigably working and confidently waiting. [5] Though commonly applied to the colony of Portuguese East Africa, the name Mozambique belongs, strictly speaking, only to the northernmost province of that possession.