Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
We did not hesitate to say what we thought about this. Even after the Agadir incident was quite closed, the tension between Germany and England had not passed away. The military party in the former country began to talk of a "preventive" war pretty loudly.
A French-English agreement. Friendship takes the place of hostility. England's relations with Italy, Russia, and Germany. Germans cultivate the friendship and trade of Turkey. The Morocco-Algeciras incident. The question of Bosnia and Herzegovina. England joins France and Russia to form the "Triple Entente." The Agadir incident. England and France had never been friendly.
"Thus, at the beginning of the present year, in spite of the withdrawal, since the Agadir affair, of very large amounts of French capital from the German market, Germany had attained to such a position that only the United States stood on a higher plane in regard to its future in the world of competitive commerce.
You remember how a French and an English warship came simultaneously, how they formed in what was equivalent to common line and how, with officers and everybody itching to open fire, war just missed being precipitated. You may not know that the British and French officers sent an ultimatum to the Captain of the Panther. Unless he left Agadir he would be forced to leave. That meant war.
Viscount Haldane, in the course of his famous visit to Berlin in February, 1912, had attempted to reach some understanding with the German Government on the limitation of the German and the British fleets. The Agadir crisis of the year before had left Europe with a bad state of nerves, and there was a general belief that only some agreement on shipbuilding could prevent a European war.
Now, had the Captain of the Panther not received the private message from the Emperor, he would have been forced by his naval code to resist this ultimatum by force. Had he gone there acting under the original official orders, red war would have blazed across in Agadir Harbor. The slightest slip would have caused it the report of a rifle. But the Panther steamed away.
Samoa East Africa Kiao-tschau the Carolines Heligoland the Cameroons: how can the acquisition of comparatively insignificant and unprofitable places like these be used for proving that the might of Germany is or has been directed towards territorial conquest? What, it may however be asked, of the Morocco adventure? Of the speech at Tangier? Of the sending of the Panther to Agadir?
A German warship without a word of notice seized Agadir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last flung down the gauntlet.
Suddenly her gunboat, the Panther, appeared off Agadir. It was meant as an assertion that Germany had as much right to intervene in Morocco as France. And it was accompanied by a demand that if France wanted to be left free in Morocco, she must buy the approval of Germany. The settlement of Morocco was to be a question solely between France and Germany.
It was after the Agadir incident, and I had been sent to Germany by my newspaper on a dovelike mission of peace, to gather sentiments of good will to England from prominent public men who might desire out of their intellectual friendship to us to pour oil on the troubled waters which had been profoundly stirred by our challenge to Germany's foreign policy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking