s.[25]
Most British residents in Morocco, probably every tourist who has been
conducted along the coast, or sniffed at the capital cities; those
firms of ours who share the bulk of the Moorish trade, and others who
yearned to open up possible mines, and undertake the public works
so urgently needed; ay, and the concession-prospectors and
company-mongers who see the prey eluding their grasp; even the
would-be heroes across the straits who have dreamed in vain of great
deeds to be done on those hills before them; all unite in deploring
what appears to them a gross blunder. After all, this is but natural.
So few of us can see beyond our own domains, so many hunger after
anything--in their particular line--that belongs to a weaker
neighbour, that it is well we have disinterested statesmen who take a
wider view. Else had we long since attempted to possess ourselves
of the whole earth, like the conquering hordes of Asia, and in
consequence we should have been dispossessed ourselves.

[25: See Appendix.]

Even to have been driven to undertake in Morocco a task such as we
were in Egypt, would have been a calamity, for our hands are too full
already of similar tasks. It is all very well in these times of peace,
but in the case of war, when we might be attacked by more than one
antagonist, we should have all our work cut out to hold what we
have. The policy of "grab," and dabbing the world with red, may be
satisfactory up to a certain point, but it will be well for us as a
nation when we realize that we have had enough. In Morocco, what is
easy for France with her contiguous province, with her plans
for trans-Saharan traffic, and her thirst to copy our colonial
expansion--though without men to spare--would have been for us costly
and unremunerative. We are well quit of the temptation.

Moreover, we have freed ourselves of a possible, almost certain, cause
of friction with France, of itself a most important gain. Just as
France would never have acquiesced in our establishing a protectorate
in Morocco without something more than words, so the rag-fed British
public, always capable of being goaded to madness by the newspapers,
would have bitterly objected to French action, if overt, while
powerless to prevent the insidious grasp from closing on Morocco by
degrees. The first war engaging at once British attention and forces
was like to see France installed in Morocco without our leave. The
early reverses of the Transvaal War in