powers ceased to be mere political agencies
and became large business enterprises. They built railroads. They
founded and subsidized steam-ship lines to all parts of the world. They
connected their different possessions with telegraph wires. And they
steadily increased their holdings in other continents. Every available
bit of African or Asiatic territory was claimed by one of the rival
powers. France became a colonial nation with interests in Algiers and
Madagascar and Annam and Tonkin (in eastern Asia). Germany claimed parts
of southwest and east Africa, built settlements in Kameroon on the
west coast of Africa and in New Guinea and many of the islands of the
Pacific, and used the murder of a few missionaries as a welcome excuse
to take the harbour of Kisochau on the Yellow Sea in China. Italy tried
her luck in Abyssinia, was disastrously defeated by the soldiers of
the Negus, and consoled herself by occupying the Turkish possessions in
Tripoli in northern Africa. Russia, having occupied all of Siberia, took
Port Arthur away from China. Japan, having defeated China in the war of
1895, occupied the island of Formosa and in the year 1905 began to
lay claim to the entire empire of Corea. In the year 1883 England, the
largest colonial empire the world has ever seen, undertook to "protect"
Egypt. She performed this task most efficiently and to the great
material benefit of that much neglected country, which ever since the
opening of the Suez canal in 1868 had been threatened with a foreign
invasion. During the next thirty years she fought a number of colonial
wars in different parts of the world and in 1902 (after three years of
bitter fighting) she conquered the independent Boer republics of the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Meanwhile she had encouraged Cecil
Rhodes to lay the foundations for a great African state, which reached
from the Cape almost to the mouth of the Nile, and had faithfully picked
up such islands or provinces as had been left without a European owner.

The shrewd king of Belgium, by name Leopold, used the discoveries of
Henry Stanley to found the Congo Free State in the year 1885. Originally
this gigantic tropical empire was an "absolute monarchy." But after many
years of scandalous mismanagement, it was annexed by the Belgian people
who made it a colony (in the year 1908) and abolished the terrible
abuses which had been tolerated by this very unscrupulous Majesty, who
cared nothing for the fate