Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for this condition of affairs, having brought it about by the short-sightedness of her colonial policy and the harshness and incapacity of her officials. Intending to found industrial colonies, she created military settlements instead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's country. Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. The soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever seeking advancement by making unnecessary expeditions into the hinterland for the purpose of “punishing” the natives, thus causing them to migrate by wholesale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese territory, so that the German colonies are left without labour and the plantations are consequently being ruined. The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule is graphically illustrated by the fact that during 1911 there were 14,849 criminal convictions in German East Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleeding backs are constantly making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny, brutality, and corruption—of some instances of which I was myself a witness—form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero nation in Germany's last “little war” in that colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign—which cost Germany five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, and which could have been avoided altogether by a little tact and kindness—half the total population of the colony was killed in battle or driven into the desert to perish. That is why the builders of the Swakopmund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa—the longest two-foot-gauge line in the world—have to send to Europe for their labour. Until Germany makes a radical change in her methods of colonial administration, and until she learns that traders and