Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 1898, England and Germany concluded a secret agreement which definitely provides for the eventual disposition of Portugal's African possessions. Of its true history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. It grew out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and ambitious schemes for the consolidation of British dominion in Africa. Appreciating, early in the Boer War, that England's success in that struggle would largely depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that master statesman proposed to the Berlin Government a plan the effect of which was to divide the reversion of Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain and Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand south of the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret Treaty, the final text of which was afterward signed by Lord Salisbury, and it was largely in virtue of this agreement that England was free from German interference during the Boer War. It is an interesting comment on the ethics of international politics that this remarkable agreement was concluded without any consultation of Portugal, the country the most vitally concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a necessity to England as it was in 1898, at which time it was the quickest way to reach the Transvaal, and, on the other hand, the West Coast is daily becoming more important for strategical and commercial reasons, for the “Afro” railway, of which I have made mention in the chapter on Morocco, will become in the near future the great highway between Europe and South America, while the railway now being built between Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will provide the easiest and quickest means of communicating with Rhodesia and the Transvaal. The terms of the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, however, as indicating how that portion of the African continent lying south of the Congo will be eventually parcelled out, and as showing the framework on which is being slowly but surely constructed Germany's African empire. The erection of such a German state across the middle of Africa would have far-reaching results in more directions than one. In the first place, it would end forever England's long-cherished ambition of eventually linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions and thus completing an “All Red” route from Cairo to the Cape. In the second place, Germany is now in a position to build her own transcontinental railway—from east to west instead of from north to south—on German or neutral soil all the way, thus removing the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under international auspices, to a very distant day, and making Dar-es-Salam and Duala, instead of Cape Town and Alexandria, the starting-points for those highways of steel which are destined to open up inner Africa.