A.—4o.

Enclosure 2 in No. 2. Mr. Meade to Dr. Busch. Dear Dr. Busch,— Hotel Eoyal, Berlin, Bth December, 1884. At the interview you were good enough to give me on Sunday I promised to send you a memorandum of the general scheme on which, in my opinion, a satisfactory settlement could be made of all the questions in which our two Governments are jointly interested. lam anxious to preserve as accurate a recollection as possible of our conversation, and I therefore venture to ask you to glance over the accompanying memorandum, which gives the substance of our talk, and also of the scheme which I suggested to you. If I have omitted anything material in what you said, or have failed to catch your meaning correctly, I hope you will kindly tell me, and that you will treat this letter on the same confidential and unofficial form as our conversation. In returning it, perhaps you may be able to tell me, confidentially, whether the scheme for the suggested settlement is one likely to commend itself to the acceptance of your Government, in which case I would earnestly press it on my Government, and it might then be made the subject of an official communication. I have not been able to find in the shops here a satisfactory map, but I enclose a tracing which shows New Guinea and some of the islands with which I propose to deal. Thanking you once more for the kindness with which you received me, I remain, &c, E. H. Meade.

No. 3. Memorandum by Mr. Meade. Dr. Busch called on me to-day and said he had no alteration to suggest in the above memorandum, which was a complete record of what had passed. Prince Bismarck desired him to say that he would see me himself in the course of a few days, and in the meantime he, Dr. Busch, was to make inquiries and ascertain whether any German firms contemplated or had already made any establishments in New Guinea. He thought from what he had heard that this was the case, but he had received instructions to clear this up. He was also to make inquiries about New Britain, New Ireland, &c. Dr. Busch said that with regard to the Cameroons and their complaints of our intrigues, he found that they w 7ere partly founded on a report of the language of Consul Hewett and the captain of an English vessel of war (the "Forward," he thought), held to the natives, telling them they were great fools for selling themselves to Germany, and they would find out later that they would have done better to accept English rather than German protection. I said this, if correctly reported, could only have been the expression of a not unnatural irritation at being forestalled, which, no doubt, had now passed away. 14th December, 1884. E. M.

No. 4. Sir E. B. Malet, K.C.8., to the Eight Hon. the Earl Granville, K.G. (Eeceived 26th December, 1884. Confidential.) My Loed, — Berlin, 24th December, 1884. I have the honour to enclose herewith two memoranda by Mr. Meade of conversations on colonial questions which he has had to-day, in the first instance with Prince Bismarck, and, secondly, with Dr. Busch, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Herr von Kusserow, the third German Plenipotentiary at the West African Conference. I have, &c, Edward B. Malet,

Enclosure 1 in No. 4. Memorandum by Mr. Meade. (Extract.) I called by appointment this morning on Prince Bismarck. He received me kindly, and our conversation lasted over an hour. He commenced by saying that German trade got on very well in British colonies —at least, in those possessing Eesponsible Government; but that in colonies belonging to some other Powers this was not the case. His principle is to follow his traders when they establish themselves on territory under no civilized jurisdiction, and to afford them protection, not against competition by levying differential duties, but against direct aggression from without. I told him that there was no difference in the commercial system of our colonies under Crown Government, and I gave him as an example that, finding a few months ago a local law at the Gambia which restricted the navigation of that river to the flag of France only among foreign nations, we had at once directed its repeal, thus throwing opsn to all nations the freedom of the river, though we were assured that the old law was a dead letter, and never acted upon; that we did this because it was against our whole system to apply differential treatment. I told him much that I had already said to Dr. Busch, as I found that the only part of my memorandum which was shown to him was that relating to the suggested settlement as between England and Germany. H.S.H. went back over the old ground as to our intrigues in the Cameroons, though to-day he referred to a new point, the supposed difficulty the Germans would be in by reason of the missionaries buying land behind them, and so, to use his own phrase, "girdling in "the German settlement and cutting them off from the interior." I repeated the assurances given by Lord Granville, and I told him, as I had told Dr. Busch, of the object Mr. Baynes, the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, had in coming to Berlin, and that I believed he had assured M. von Kusserow that their only desire was to carry on their

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