forerunners to herald the coming of the iron horse. France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has been remarkably free from obstructions, for, barring the Algerian campaign of 1830, and the German-created incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her vast domain—close on half the total area of the continent—at a surprisingly low cost in money and lives. The only time, indeed, when her African ambitions received a serious setback was in 1898, at Fashoda (now known as Kodok), on the White Nile, when the French explorer, Major Marchand, yielded to the peremptory demand of Lord Kitchener and hauled down the tricolour which he had raised at that remote spot, thus losing to France the whole of the Western Sudan and the control of the head-waters of the Nile. There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic history in this connection. The story has been told me by both French and British officials—and there is good reason to believe that it is true—that the French Government had planned, in case Marchand was able to hold his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert the waters of the White Nile, at a point near its junction with the Sobat River, into the Sahara, an undertaking which, owing to the physical characteristics of that region, would, so the French engineers claimed, have been entirely feasible. France would thus have accomplished the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert territory and of turning Egypt into a desert by diverting her only supply of water; for this, remember, was in those bitter, jealous days before the Anglo-French _entente_. It was, indeed, the intelligence that the Khalifa proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to her knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition to be pushed forward so rapidly. (I should add that the idea, once so popular in France, of turning the Sahara into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable, if not impossible.) It is safe to say that England's prime reason for clinging so tenaciously, and at such heavy cost, to the arid tract known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is to safeguard Egyptian prosperity by keeping control of the head-waters of the Nile. To illustrate how completely the Nile is the barometer of Egyptian prosperity, I might add that the last time I was in Khartoum the officials of the Sudanese Irrigation Service complained to me most bitterly that they were being seriously hampered in their work of desert reclamation by the restrictions placed upon the quantity of water which they were permitted to divert from the Nile, a comparatively small diversion from the upper reaches of the river causing wide-spread distress among the Egyptian agriculturists a thousand miles down-stream.