The Daily Telegraph SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1882.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3569, 16 December 1882, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1882.

Our cablegrams have lately referred to the apparently hostile action of the French towards Madagascar. On Wednesday we learnt that the French Government had withdrawn their representative from the Island of Madagascar, and it waa feared that hostilities were imminent. The history ot the claims of France reminds one of the fable of the wolf and the lamb. Under no circumstances can the weakest of the tw# parties be right. To the ordinary mind the claims of the French Republic to any portion of Madagascar are preposterously absurd, but, being strong enough to enforce them, they will probably be obtained. Twenty-one years ago, we learn from an English contemporary, Radama II ceded to a French company almost sovereign rights of colonization in the" best parts of the island. The treaty wa§ \ opposed by the chief men in the island, f who in 1863 repudiated it by the summary but effectual method of killing the King who had concluded it. Two years later, under pressure, they consented to pay'£4o,ooo as compensation to the i dispossessed company, and the formal recognition of his successor as Queen of Madagascar by the Emperor Napoleon was believed to have finally terminated all French pretensions to any part of the island. The steady increase or English trade with the natives, and the predominance of the English missionaries at the Court of the Queen, completed the exclusion of French influence from the island. French consuls, backed by French gunboats, have been pressing French claims upon the Government of Madagascar, and a few months ago they asserted an absolute pretension to a part of Madagascar by the summary process of landing on the coast and hewing down the Queen's standards. The northwest of the island, inhabited by the Sakalavas, they said, was French territory. Yet only last year they had extorted an indemnity from the Government of the Queen for the death of some French Arab slaves who were killed by the natives ,pf • the north-west while attempting illegally to land slaves there. The sovereignty of the Queen over the disputed district was thus recognized in order to. bold her responsible for the acts ot its inhabitants, and then repudiated in order to assert the sovereignty of France. There are other matters of dispute, but they all spring out of the persistence of tbe French in pressing claims founded upon more or less mythical treaties of tbe MaeocoBrazza type which seriously impair the independence and integrity of the kingdom of Madagascar. Africa of late eeems to have exercised a fatal fascination for the Western Powers. In the last fifteen years England has waged no fewer than six African wars. Our armies have fought in Abyssinia, in Ashantee, in Basutoland,in Zululand, in tbe Transvaal, and in Egypt. It would almost teem as if France were about to follow tbe same blood-stained path. Yet a contemplation of the barrenness of all our victories might well dissuade a less cautious nation than the French from adopting a forward policy on the African continent.