I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly placed and intimately informed European officials in North Africa when I assert that Germany's repeated interference with the French programme in Morocco was due as much to military as to political reasons, the Germans using this means to hinder the expansion of that mysterious _force noire_ which has long been a bugaboo to the War Office authorities in Berlin. Whether this was the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the Moroccan business, no one knows better than the German general staff that, in the event of war, the Republic would be able to advance a great black army to the banks of the Rhine in thirty days—and that she would not be deterred by the scruples which prevented her utilising her African soldiery in 1870. It has been repeatedly urged, indeed, that the numerical inferiority of the annual French conscription, as compared with that of Germany, be made up for by drafting a corps of black troops drawn from French West Africa into the continental army. France has already recruited very close to twenty thousand native troops—which is the strength of an army corps—in her West African possessions alone, and as any scheme for drafting it into Algeria, so as to enable the French troops stationed there to be available elsewhere, would instantly arouse the Arab population to revolt, it is highly probable that this African army corps would, in case of war, be employed on the European continent. Though France's African army does not at present number much over fifty thousand men—all well drilled, highly disciplined, and modernly armed—the French drill-sergeants in Africa are not idle and have limitless resources to draw from. The population of the negro states under French protection runs into many millions, and would easily yield twenty per cent of fighting men, while the acquisition of Morocco has added the Berbers, that strange, warlike, Caucasian race, to the Republic's fighting line. Nothing pleases the African as an occupation more than soldiering, his native physique, courage, and endurance making him, with amazingly little training, a first-class fighting man. It is no great wonder, then, that Germany looks askance at the formidable army which her rival is building up so quietly but so steadily on the other side of the Middle Sea.