ABSTRACT
When Vansittart, early in July, asked France to give him at the outset fifty millions sterling, which he proposed to double out of his own pocket, for the purpose of starting the conquest of the Sahara, he no longer used the language of heated rhetoric, but descended to plain facts and figures. He was not now dealing with the imaginative poet or the venal politician, but with the shrewd and cautious investor, who had to be convinced that at the end of years of frightful struggle against the most potent forces of Nature a fertile province, as large as the whole of Europe, would be won for France from the wastes of torrid sand. The American colony in Paris were greatly puzzled by the proceedings of their apparently eccentric fellow countryman. They crowded his receptions, and with characteristic naivete invited him to confide his intentions to them fully and without reserve.
