ing.

Let us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that she has
made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which represents one of
the most successful of those operations of colonial expansion which
have marked her history during the last forty years. What has been the
precise effect on French prosperity?

In thirty years, at a cost of many million sterling (it is part of
successful colonial administration in France never to let it be known
what the colonies really cost) France has founded in Tunis a colony, in
which to-day there are, excluding soldiers and officials, about 25,000
genuine French colonists: just the number by which the French
population in France--the real France--is diminishing every six
months! And the value of Tunis as a market does not even amount to the
sum which France spends directly on its occupation and administration,
to say nothing of the indirect extension of military burden which its
conquest involves; and, of course, the market which it represents would
still exist in some form, though England--or even Germany--administered
the country.

In other words, France loses twice every year in her home population
two colonies equivalent to Tunis--if we measure colonies in terms of
communities made up of the race which has sprung from the mother
country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and diplomats can
point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially and exotically under
conditions which must in the long run be inimical to their race, it is
pointed to as "expansion" and as evidence that France is maintaining
her position as a Great Power. A few years, as history goes, unless
there is some complete change of tendencies which at present seem as
strong as ever, the French race as we now know it will have ceased to
exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by the
Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are to-day in
France more Germans than there are Frenchmen in all the colonies that
France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with
France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French
colonies. France is to-day a better colony for the Germans than they
could make of any exotic colony which France owns.

"They _tell_ me," said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite
original _mot_), "that the Germans are at Agadir. I _know_ they are in
the Champs-Elysees." Which, of course, is in reality a much more
serious mat