ermany, and still more of Italy, Britain was
far more complaisant.

It is difficult to give in a brief space a clear summary of the
extremely complicated events and intrigues of this vitally important
period. But perhaps it will be easiest if we consider in turn the
regions in which the strenuous rivalries of the powers displayed
themselves. The most important was Africa, which lay invitingly near to
Europe, and was the only large region of the world which was still for
the most part unoccupied. Here all the competitors, save Russia, Japan,
and America, played a part. Western Asia formed a second field, in
which three powers only, Russia, Germany, and Britain, were immediately
concerned. The Far East, where the vast Empire of China seemed to be
falling into decrepitude, afforded the most vexed problems of the
period. Finally, the Pacific Islands were the scene of an active though
less intense rivalry.

It is a curious fact that Africa, the continent whose outline was the
first outside of Europe itself to be fully mapped out by the European
peoples, was actually the last to be effectively brought under the
influence of European civilisation. This was because the coasts of
Africa are for the most part inhospitable; its vast interior plateau is
almost everywhere shut off either by belts of desert land, or by swampy
and malarious regions along the coast; even its great rivers do not
readily tempt the explorer inland, because their course is often
interrupted by falls or rapids not far from their mouths, where they
descend from the interior plateau to the coastal plain; and its
inhabitants, warlike and difficult to deal with, are also peoples of
few and simple wants, who have little to offer to the trader. Hence
eight generations of European mariners had circumnavigated the
continent without seriously attempting to penetrate its central mass;
and apart from the Anglo-Dutch settlements at the Southern extremity,
the French empire in Algeria in the north, a few trading centres on the
West Coast, and some half-derelict Portuguese stations in Angola and
Mozambique, the whole continent remained available for European
exploitation in 1878.

What trade was carried on, except in Egypt, in Algeria, and in the
immediate vicinity of the old French settlements on the West Coast, was
mainly in the hands of British merchants. Over the greater part of the
coastal belts only the British power was known to the native tribes and
chieftain