It is surprising how little even the well-informed know of these far places which Germany has taken for her own. Fertile spots as any upon earth, covered with hard-wood forests and watered by many rivers, when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's deck they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for a sylvan opera. Go a thousand yards back from that smiling coast, however, and the illusion disappears, for you find a country whose hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving of its title—“the white man's graveyard.” The statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and clang of German railway-builders' tools, though the plantations of government-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she has spent on them thousands of lives and millions of marks, Germany's only returns thus far have been a few annual tons of ivory, copra, and rubber, some excellent but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely stations where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I would stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back-of-beyond, sun-blistered, fever-stricken German Africa will be a great colony some day. From the care with which they are laid out, from the perfection of their sanitary arrangements, from the substantiality of their public buildings and official residences and their suitability to the climatic conditions, the travellers who confine their investigations to the coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga and Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund and Duala are the gateways to rich and prosperous colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to their own colonies, preferring those where English is the speech and where there are fewer officials and more freedom. To-day, therefore, you find the model German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as though you were walking through a municipal exhibition, almost wholly peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound officials, while the German traders are carrying on thriving businesses under the English flag at Mombasa and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone.