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 responsibilities. We have ours; and I claim before history that we (Socialists) had foreseen and announced them. When we declared that to penetrate into Morocco by violence, by force of arms, was to inaugurate in Europe an era of ambitions, covetousness, and conflicts, we were denounced as bad Frenchmen, but it was we who were concerned for France. There, alas! is our share of responsibility.

Given carte blanche by British diplomacy, the French Government thenceforth advanced by rapid steps to the goal of its desires. It knew, although the British and French people did not, that French generals were bending, in community of association with their British colleagues, over war maps and strategic combinations, while British and French naval commanders were working out in concert the disposition of their respective fleets. Trampling upon public obligations, Moorish rights, and German susceptibilities alike, the French politicians of the "forward school," dragging a reluctant Chamber behind them, marched to the conquest of Morocco. Within five years of the signing of the Act of Algeciras, the independence and integrity of Morocco had gone by the board, tens of thousands of Moors had been killed, Morocco was a French Protectorate, and official Germany, baffled and -enraged, feeling herself diplomatically humiliated, nursed her sores, while her Emperor, "whose personal influence had been exercised in many critical circumstances in favour of the maintenance of peace," had been "brought to think that war with France was inevitable."

In March, 1907, the French occupied the first Moorish town, Udja, on the pretext of the murder of a French subject by Moors. They promised to withdraw, but remained. M. Pichon, the Foreign Minister, denied that this action was a "step towards Fez." In September a Franco-Spanish syndicate, in constructing a railway at Casablanca, deliberately desecrated a Moorish burial ground of great antiquity. A collision between the employees of the French railway contractors and the populace ensued, in the course of which several of the former lost their lives. A French fleet thereupon bombarded Casablanca, the helpless Moors being slaughtered in thousands amid the indignant protest of British and