Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 'own free will, she would not let Great Britain forget that she, too, had given many assurances that she had no intention of maintaining a permanent position there. Finally there was the century-old conflict over the fishing rights granted on what was called the French shore in Newfoundland. Here the French had to contend not only with Great Britain, but also with a colonial government which was not always willing to carry out arrangements made by the mother country.16 But whether the question raised was, Is a lobster a fish under the Treaty of Utrecht? or whether the dispute was over a Chinese pagoda and a cemetery, the two powers were mutually engaged in a policy of pin-pricks that might at any moment bring them into active conflict. The Fashoda incident only too clearly showed the danger: ?France and England were face to face like birds in a cock-pit, while Europe under German leadership, was fastening their spurs, and impatient to see them fight to the death. 1T Before taking up the Fashoda affair, with which our narrative proper begins?for although the roots of the affair go back to the regime of M. Hanotaux, it was M. Delcasse who was given the disagreeable task of finding a solution?a brief glance at French internal politics is essential. Ever since 1894, when Captain Dreyfus was convicted of treason in a trial which left much to be desired from the point of view of justice, the Dreyfus affair hovered like a bird of ill omen over successive ministries, refusing to be driven away until the whole rotten carcass should be dragged forth and exposed to the light of publicity. Four successive ministers of war, after examining the famous dossier, upon whose contents Captain Dreyfus was convicted, had declared him guilty, and had opposed revision of the case. M. Meline, ..