Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty or purchase, a railway zone across German East Africa, such as we have obtained for the Canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much as though there would never be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of Cecil John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There are several reasons why Germany is not inclined to give England the much-desired right of way. First, because between the two nations a bitter rivalry, political and commercial, exists, and the Germans feel that already far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the Union Jack; secondly, because the Germans are, as I have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, themselves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam, the capital of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by means of this line they expect to divert to their own ports the trade of all that portion of inner Africa lying between Rhodesia and the Sudan; thirdly, because it is unlikely in the extreme that England would give Germany such a _quid pro quo_ as she would demand—as, for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port in German Southwest Africa, or of the British protectorate of Zanzibar, or of both; fourthly, because the Germans now have the British in just such a predicament regarding the completion of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway as the British have the Germans regarding the completion of the Bagdad railway. In other words, the only condition on which either country will permit its rival's railway to be built through its territory is internationalisation.