IN speaking of an important development such as the Entente Cordiale a man must feel some hesitation in illustrating his discourse by any personal references or reminiscences. On the other hand what is so important in esti.mating historical events is to have some idea of the general temperature of feeling, the general climate of opinion, in which they occurred. The Anglo-French Agreements of 8 April I904 marked a change in British foreign policy which later became known as the Entente. My father had been appointed British Minister in Morocco in I895 and from the age of nine to the age of eighteen I looked upon that beautiful, and at that date, distracted country as the place where I spent my holidays. I now realize that for the first six years at least of his mission at Tangier, my father's main function was to work for Moorish independence and therefore to counter French influence with the Sultan, even as his opposite number, the French Consul General at Cairo, was doing all he could to persuade the Khedive that there did exist some possible alternative to complete submission to Lord Cromer's gentle persuasion. Quite suddenly, as it seemed, a new course was adopted. My father, and I presume also the French Consul General in Cairo, received instructions to take a different tack: instead of his telling the Moors to be suspicious of the French, he had to tell them that they must accord the French their fullest confidence: instead of the French Consul General telling the Khedive that Lord Cromer was nasty, he had to begin suddenly to assure his Highness that he was very nice indeed. Since they were each of them trained diplomatists, and therefore realized that local embarrassments were subordinate to general policy, I am sure that they executed their instructions with loyalty and skill. My father, I know, was comforted in what might have seemed a transference of loyalties, owing to the fact, that, whereas he had always been on the best terms of intellectual and personal friendship with his two successive French colleages, M. St Rene' Taillandier and M. Revoil, he had found it difficult to establish relations of amity with his German colleagues. But there was a far more important reason that induced him to welcome a French protectorate over a country whose independence, for the last eight years, he had been seeking, with ever diminishing confidence, to promote. By I903 he had come to the conclusion that the weakness of the Central