the restriction upon their control of trade should lapse.  It recognised the illegality of the slave-trade, and imposed upon annexing powers the duty of helping to suppress it; this provision was made much fuller and more definite by a second conference at Brussels in 1890, on the demand of Britain, who had hitherto contended almost alone against the traffic in human flesh.  But no attempt was made to define native rights, to safeguard native customs, to prohibit the maintenance of forces larger than would be necessary for the maintenance of order:  in short, no attempt was made to lay down the doctrine that the function of a ruling power among backward peoples is that of a trustee on behalf of its simple subjects and on behalf of civilisation.  That the partition of Africa should have been effected without open war, and that the questions decided at Berlin should have been so easily and peacefully agreed upon, seemed at the moment to be a good sign.  But the spirit which the conference expressed was not a healthy spirit.

After 1884 the activity of the powers in exploration, annexation and development became more furious than ever.  Britain now began seriously to arouse herself to the danger of exclusion from vast areas where her interests had hitherto been predominant; and it was during these years that all her main acquisitions of territory in Africa were made:  Rhodesia and Central Africa in the south, East Africa and Somaliland in the East, Nigeria and the expansion of her lesser protectorates in the West.  To these years also belonged the definite, and most unfortunate, emergence of Italy as a colonising power.  She had got a foothold in Eritrea in 1883; in 1885 it was, with British aid, enlarged by the annexation of territory which had once been held by Egypt, but had been abandoned when she lost the Soudan.  But the Italian claims in Eritrea brought on conflict with the neighbouring native power of Abyssinia.  In spite of a sharp defeat at Dogali in 1887, she succeeded in holding her own in this conflict; and in 1889 Abyssinia accepted a treaty which Italy claimed to be a recognition of her suzerainty.  But the Abyssinians repudiated this interpretation; and in a new war, which began in 1896, inflicted upon the Italians so disastrous a defeat at Adowa that they were constrained to admit the complete independence of Abyssinia—­the sole native state which has so far been able to hold its own against the pressure of Europe.  Meanwhile in 1889 and the following years Italy had, once more with the direct concurrence of Britain, marked out a new territory in Somaliland.