intervention.  Britain went on alone; and although she hoped and believed that she would quickly be able to restore order, and thereupon to evacuate the country, found herself drawn into a labour of reconstruction that could not be dropped.  We shall in the next chapter have more to say on the British occupation of Egypt, as part of the British achievement during this period.  In the meanwhile, its immediate result was continuous friction between France and Britain.  France could not forgive herself or Britain for the opportunity which she had lost.  The embitterment caused by the Egyptian question lasted throughout the period, and was not healed till the Entente of 1904.  It intensified and exacerbated the rivalry of the two countries in other fields.  It made each country incapable of judging fairly the actions of the other.  To wounded and embittered France, the perfectly honest British explanations of the reasons for delay in evacuating Egypt seemed only so many evidences of hypocrisy masking greed.  To Britain the French attitude seemed fractious and unreasonable, and she suspected in every French forward movement in other fields—­ notably in the Eastern Soudan and the upper valley of the Nile—­an attempt to attack or undermine her.  Thus Egypt, like Tunis, illustrated the influence of European politics in the extra-European field.  The power that profited most was Germany, who had strengthened herself by drawing Italy into the Triple Alliance, and had kept France at her mercy by using colonial questions as a means of alienating her from her natural friends.  It was, in truth, only from this point of view that colonial questions had any interest for Bismarck.  He was, as he repeatedly asserted almost to the day of his death, ‘no colony man.’  But the time was at hand when he was to be forced out of this attitude.  For already the riches of tropical Africa were beginning to attract the attention of Europe.

The most active and energetic of the powers in tropical Africa was France.  From her ancient foothold at Senegal she was already, in the late ’seventies, pushing inland towards the upper waters of the Niger; while further south her vigorous explorer de Brazza was penetrating the hinterland behind the French coastal settlements north of the Congo mouth.  Meanwhile the explorations of Livingstone and Stanley had given the world some conception of the wealth of the vast exterior.  In 1876 Leopold, King of the Belgians, summoned a conference at Brussels to consider the possibility of setting the exploration and settlement of Africa upon an international basis.  Its result was the formation of an International African Association, with branches in all the principal countries.  But from the first the branches dropped all serious pretence of international action.  They became (so far as they exercised any influence) purely national organisations for the purpose of acquiring the maximum amount of territory for their own states.  And the central body, after attempting a few unsuccessful