defending the ratification of the Franco-German Convention of November, 1911—the efforts of Germany in Morocco for half a century, the travels of her explorers, the activity of her colonists, her agricultural and mineral enterprises, her steamship lines, her post-offices, and especially that movement of ideas which gravitated towards the Shereefian Empire. …
But no such admission was ever made by a leading British authority. To this day, owing to deliberate misrepresentation and suppression of the facts, nine Englishmen out of ten are utterly ignorant of the part played by the Morocco affair in international politics, and deem Germany's action throughout to have been totally unjustifiable.
Another distinguished Frenchman, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, speaking in the French Senate on February 6, 1912, uttered an outspoken denunciation of the whole wretched intrigue:
The French Parliament by an abuse morally, if not constitutionally, unpardonable, was kept in ignorance of this policy… Far from ensuring general Peace, the arrangements of 1904 tended to compromise it… Why was the French Parliament told only half the truth when it was asked to give its opinion upon our arrangement with England? Why was it not allowed to suspect that this arrangement had as its complement and corrective some secret clauses and other secret Treaties? It is this—it is this double game towards Parliament and the world which becomes morally an abuse-of trust… Now the whole effect of the arrangement of 1904 appears to-day in its truth and in its vanity. It was a Treaty of friendship with England recognising the freedom of our political action in N, Morocco, and also proclaiming our will to respect the integrity of that country; that was what the public knew and approved. But the public was ignorant that at the same time, by other Treaties, and by contradictory clauses hidden from it, the partition of Morocco between Spain and France was prepared, of that Morocco whose integrity we had guaranteed. There existed two irreconcilable French policies in Morocco, that of public arrangements, i.e., a policy of integrity which was not the true one; and that of secret arrangements postulating a Protectorate and the partition of Morocco.
When the European anarchy had become uncontrollable, largely as the result of this "double game" played over Morocco, a few days only before the final outbreak, and before his own foul murder, one of the few outstanding figures in Europe, Jean Jaurés, laid an unerring finger upon its origins:
