FOUNDING OF MOROCCO.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 27 October 1924, Page 6

FOUNDING OF MOROCCO.

PERPETUAL THORN IN THE SIDE OF EUROPE. Morocco, where there is talk of the possibility of trouble in the French zone in addition to the Spanish complications, seenis to be, one of those countries destined by Fate to check the pride of Europe, writes a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Augustus established the Roman power along the north till the Vandals swept it away, but through the Middle Ages it was in the hands of the Arabs, who used it as a reservoir for recruiting their forces in Spain. The tide turned with the expulsion of the Moors from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, but the Spanish Moors and .the Jews established Morocco as a Rower to which both England and France accredited envoys. Portugese possession of Tangier brought it into tlie possession of the English Crown when Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, but our occupation of I angier was a source of constant trouble and expense. Spain claimed it from us, and although Charles told the Spaniards that they had as little right to Tangier as to Plymouth, he was glad enough to abandon the costly and useless possession in 1684. Tangier had ,its revenge, for it sent back to England that regiment of freebooters, Kirke’s Lambs, who are not yet forgotten jn the West.

French penetration of Morocco .began to worry Europe, in the nineteenth century, and, although the Conference of Madrid in 1880 adjusted some difficulties, Morocco still loomed over the peace of Europe and became actively threatening in this century when Spain, France, and Germany were all at work in the country The Algeciras Conference averted trouble for a time, but the Agadir incident in 1911 was one of those portents which foretold the Great War by exacerbating European feeling. Raisuli became a recurrent name in the newspapers; both France and Spain bad to organise expeditions after the war; Spain’s defeats produced a Soanisli revolution, and may yet produce another.