FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[57]See Lucas’sHistorical Geography of the British Colonies, Oxford, 1894.[58]Parliamentary Paper, C 6701, 92.

[57]See Lucas’sHistorical Geography of the British Colonies, Oxford, 1894.

[58]Parliamentary Paper, C 6701, 92.

Wherein is set down briefly in what manner of ways the Crown Colony system works evil in Western Africa.

I have attempted to state that the Crown Colony system is unsuited for governing Western Africa, and have attributed its malign influence to its being a system which primarily expresses the opinions of well-intentioned but ill-informed officials at home, instead of being, according to the usual English type of institution, representative of the interests of the people who are governed, and of those who have the largest stake in the countries controlled by it—the merchants and manufacturing classes of England. It remains to point out how it acts adversely to the prosperity of all concerned; for be it clearly understood there is no corruption in it whatsoever: there is waste of men’s lives, moneys, and careers, but nothing more at present. By-and-by it will add to its other charms and functions that of being, in the early future, a sort of patent and successful incubator for hatching a fine lively brood of little Englanders, who will cry out, “What is the good of West Africa?” and so forth; and they will seem sweetly reasonable, because by then West Africa will be down on the English rates, a pauper.

It may seem inconceivable, however, that the present governing body of West Africa, the home officials, and the English public as represented in Parliament, can be ill-informed. West Africa has not been just shot up out of the ocean by a submarine volcanic explosion; nor are we landing on it out of Noah’s ark, for the thing has been in touch with Europe since the fifteenth century; yet, inconceivable as it may seem that there is not by now formulated and in working order a method of governing it suitable for its nature, the fact that this is so remains, and providentially for us it is quite easy of explanation without abusing any one; though no humane person, like myself for example, can avoid sincerely hoping that Mr. Kipling is wrong when he sings

“Deep in all dishonour have we stained our garments’ hem.Yet be ye not dismayed, we have stumbled and have strayed.Our leaders went from righteousness, the Lord will deal with them.”

For although it is true that we have made a mess of this great feeding ground for England’s manufacturing millions; yet there are no leaders on whom blame alone can fall, whom we can make scapegoats out of, who can be driven away into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. The blame lies among all those classes of people who have had personally to deal with West Africa and the present system; and the Crown Colony system and the resolution of ’65 are merely the necessary fungi of rotten stuff, for they have arisen from the information that has been, and has not been, placed at the disposal of our Government in England by the Government officials of West Africa, the Missionaries, and the Traders.

We will take the traders’ blame first—their contribution to the evil dates from about 1827 and consists in omission—frankly, I think that they, in their generation, were justified in not telling all they could tell about the Coast. They found they could get on with it, keep it quiet and manage the natives fairly well under the system of Courts of Equity in the Rivers, and the Committee of merchants with a Governor approved of by the Home Government, which was working on the Gold Coast up to 1843. In 1841 there arose the affair of Governor Maclean, and the inauguration of the line of policy which resulted in the resolution of 1865. The governmental officials having cut themselves off from the traders and taken over West Africa, failed to manage West Africa, and so resolved that West Africa was not worth managing,—a thing they are bound to do again.

The abuse showered on the merchants, and the terrific snubs with which the Government peppered them, did not make the traders blossom and expand, and shower information on those who criticised them—there are some natures that are not sweetened by Adversity. Moreover, the Government, when affairs had been taken over by the Offices in London, took the abhorrent form of Customs, and displayed a lively love of the missionary-made African, as he was then,—you can read about him in Burton[59]—and for the rest got up rows with the traders’ best customers, the untutored African; rows, as the traders held, unnecessary in their beginning and feeble-handed in their termination. The whole of this sort of thing made the trader section keep all the valuable information to itself, and spend its energies in eluding the Customs, and talking what Burton terms “Commercial English.”

Then we come to the contribution made by the Government officials to the formation of an erroneousopinion concerning the state of affairs in West Africa. This arose from the conditions that surrounded them there, and the way in which they were unable, even if they desired, to expand their influence, distrusted naturally enough by the trading community since 1865, held in continuously by their home instructions, and unprovided with a sufficient supply of men or money on shore to go in for empire making, and also villainously badly quartered,—as you can see by reading Ellis’sWest African Sketches. It is small wonder and small blame to them that their account of West Africa has been a gloomy one, and such it must remain until these men are under a different system: for all the reasons that during the past have caused them to paint the Coast as a place of no value to England, remain still in full force,—as you can see by studying the disadvantages that service in a West African Crown Colony presents to-day to a civilian official.

Firstly, the climate is unhealthy, so that the usual make of Englishman does not like to take his wife out to the Coast with him. This means keeping two homes, which is expensive, and it gives a man no chance of saving money on an income say of £600 a year, for the official’s life in West Africa is necessarily, let him be as economical as he may, an expensive one; and, moreover, things are not made more cheerful for him by his knowing that if he dies there will be no pension for his wife.

Secondly, there being no regular West African Service, there is no security for promotion; owing to the unhealthiness of the climate it is very properly ordained that each officer shall serve a year on the Coast, and then go home on a six months’ furlough. It is a fairly common thing for a man to die before his twelve months’ term is up, anda still more common one for him to have to go on sick leave. Of course, the moment he is off, some junior official has to take his place and do his work. But in the event of the man whose work he does dying, gaining a position in another region, or promotion, the man who has been doing the work has no reason to hope he will step into the full emoluments and honours of the appointment, although experience will thus have given him an insight into the work. On the contrary, it too often happens that some new man, either fresh from London or who has already held a Government appointment in some totally different region to the West African, is placed in the appointment. If this new man is fresh to such work as he has to do, the displaced man has to teach him; if he is from a different region, he usually won’t be taught, and he does not help to develop a spirit of general brotherly love and affection in the local governmental circles by the frank statement that he considers West African officials “jugginses” or “muffs,” although he fairly offers to “alter this and show them how things ought to be done.”

Then again the civilian official frequently complains that he has no such recognition given him for his services as is given to the military men in West Africa. I have so often heard the complaint, “Oh, if a man comes here and burns half a dozen villages he gets honours; while I, who keep the villages from wanting burning, get nothing;” and mind you, this is true. Like the rest of my sex I suffer from a chronic form of scarlet fever, and, from a knowledge of the country there, I hold it rubbish to talk of the brutality of mowing down savages with a Maxim gun when it comes to talking of West African bush fighting; for your West African is not an unarmed savage, he doesnot assemble in the manner of Dr. Watts’s ants, but wisely ensconces himself in the pleached arbours of his native land, and lets fly at you with a horrid scatter gun. This is bound to hit, and when it hits makes wounds worse than those made by a Maxim; in fact he quite turns bush fighting into a legitimate sport, let alone the service done him by his great ally, the climate. Still, it is hard on the civilian, and bad for English interests in West Africa, that the man who by his judgment, sympathy, and care, keeps a district at peace, should have less recognition than one who, acting under orders, doing his duty gallantly, and all that, goes and breaks up all native prosperity and white trade.

All these things acting together produce on the local Government official a fervid desire to get home to England, and obtain an appointment in some other region than the West Coast. I feel sure I am well within the mark when I say that two-thirds of the present Government officials in the West African English Crown Colonies have their names down on the transfer list, or are trying to get them there; and this sort of thing simply cannot give them an enthusiasm for their work sufficient to ensure its success, and of course leads to their painting a dismal picture of West Africa itself.

I am perfectly well aware that the conditions of life of officials in West Africa are better than those described by Ellis. Nevertheless, they are not yet what they should be: a corrugated iron house may cost a heap of money and yet not be a Paradise. I am also aware that the houses and general supplies given to our officials are immensely more luxurious than those given to German or French officials; but this does not compensate for thehorrors of boredom suffused with irritation to which the English official is subjected. More than half the quarrelling and discontent for which English officials are celebrated, and which are attributed to drink and the climate, simply arise from the domestic arrangements enforced on them in Coast towns, whereby they see far too much of each other. If you take any set of men and make them live together, day out and day in, without sufficient exercise, without interest in outside affairs, without dividing them up into regular grades of rank, as men are on board ship or in barracks, you are simply bound to have them dividing up into cliques that quarrel; the things they quarrel over may seem to an outsider miserably petty, but these quarrels are the characteristic eruption of the fever discontent. And may I ask you if the opinion of men in such a state is an opinion on which a sound policy wherewith to deal with so complex a region can be formed? I think not, yet these men and the next class alone are the makers of our present policy—the instructors of home official opinion.

The next class is the philanthropic party. It is commonly confused with the missionary, but there is this fundamental difference between them. The missionary, pure and simple, is a man who loves God more than he loves himself, or any man. His service (I am speaking on fundamental lines, as far as I can see) is to place in God’s charge, for the glory of God, souls, that according to his belief, would otherwise go elsewhere. The philanthropist is a person who loves man; but he or she is frequently no better than people who kill lapdogs by over-feeding, or who shut up skylarks in cages, while it is quite conceivable to me, for example, that a missionary could kill a man to save his soul, a philanthropist kill hissoul to save his life, and there is in this a difference. I have never been able to get up any respectful enthusiasm for the so-called philanthropist, so that I have to speak of him with calm care; not as I have spoken of the missionary, feeling he was a person I could not really harm by criticising his methods.

It is, however, nowadays hopeless to attempt to separate these two species, distinct as I believe them to be; and they together undoubtedly constitute what is called the Mission party not only in England but in Germany. I believe this alliance has done immense harm to the true missionary, for to it I trace that tendency to harp upon horrors and general sensationalism which so sharply differentiates the modern from the classic missionary reports. Take up that noble story of Dennis de Carli and Michael Angelo of Gattina, and read it through, and then turn on to wise, clear-headed Merolla da Sorrento, and read him; you find there no sensationalism. Now and again, when deeply tried, they will say, “These people live after a beastly manner, and converse freely with the Devil,” but you soon find them saying, “Among these people there are some excellent customs,” and they give you full details of them, with evident satisfaction. You see it did not fundamentally matter to these early missionaries whether their prospective converts “had excellent customs” or “lived after a beastly manner,” from a religious standpoint. Not one atom—they were the sort of men who would have gone for Plato, Socrates, and all the Classics gaily, holding that they were not Christians as they ought to be; but this never caused them to paint a distorted portrait of the African. This thing, I believe, the modern philanthropist has induced the modern missionary only too frequently to do, and theother regrettable element which has induced him to do it has been the apathy of the English public, a public which unless it were stirred up by horrors would not subscribe. Again the blame is with England at home, but the harm done is paid for in West Africa. The portrait painted of the African by the majority, not all, but the majority of West African mission reports, has been that of a child, naturally innocent, led away and cheated by white traders and grievously oppressed by his own rulers. I grant you, the African taken as a whole is the gentlest kind of real human being that is made. I do not however class him with races who carry gentleness to a morbid extent, and for governmental purposes you must not with any race rely on their main characteristic alone; for example, Englishmen are honest, yet still we require the police force.

The evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost incalculable; from it has arisen the estrangement of English interests, as represented by our reason for adding West Africa to our Empire at all—the trader—and the English Government as represented by the Crown Colony system; and it has also led to our present policy of destroying powerful native States and the power of the African ruling classes at large. Secondarily it is the cause of our wars in West Africa. That this has not been and is not the desire of the mission party it is needless to say; that the blame is directly due to the Crown Colony system it is as needless to remark; for any reasonable system of its age would long ere now have known the African at first hand, not as it knows him, and knows him only, at its head-quarters, London, from second-hand vitiated reports. It has, nowadays, at its service the common sense and humane opinions of the English trade lords as represented by theChambers of Commerce of Liverpool and Manchester; but though just at present it listens to what they say—thanks to Mr. Chamberlain—yet it cannot act on their statements, but only querulously says, “Your information does not agree with our information.” Allah forbid that the information of the party with whom I have had the honour to be classed should agree with that sort of information from other sources; and I would naturally desire the rulers of West Africa to recognise the benefit they now enjoy of having information of a brand that has not led to such a thing as the Sierre Leone outbreak for example, and to remember in this instance that six months before the hut tax there was put on, the Chambers had strongly advised the Government against it, and had received in reply the answer that “The Secretary of State sees no reason to suppose that the hut tax will be oppressive, or that it will be less easy to collect in Sierra Leone than in Gambia.” Why, you could not get a prophetic almanac into a second issue if it were not based on truer knowledge than that which made it possible for such a thing to be said. Nevertheless, no doubt this remarkable sentence was written believing the same to be true, and confiding in the information in the hands of the Colonial Office from the official and philanthropic sources in which the Office believes.

FOOTNOTES:[59]Wanderings in West Africa, vol. i., 1863.

[59]Wanderings in West Africa, vol. i., 1863.

Wherein is set down the other, or main, reason against this system.

Having attempted to explain the internal evils or what one might call the domestic rows of the Crown colony system, I will pass on to the external evils—which although in a measure consequent on the internal are not entirely so, and this point cannot be too clearly borne in mind. Tinker it up as you may, the system will remain one pre-eminently unsuited for the administration of West Africa.

You might arrange that officials working under it should be treated better than the official now is, and the West African service be brought into line in honour with the Indian, and afford a man a good sound career. You might arrange for the Chambers of Commerce, representing the commercial factor, to have a place in Colonial Office councils. But if you did these things the Crown colony system would still remain unsuited to West Africa, because it is a system intrinsically too expensive in men and money, so that the more you develop it the more expensive it becomes. Concerning this system as applied to the West Indies a West Indian authority the other day said it was putting an elephant to draw a goat chaise;concerning the West African application of it, I should say it was trying to open a tin case with a tortoise-shell paper knife. Of course you will say I am no authority, and you must choose between those who will tell you that only a little patience is required and the result of the present governmental system in West Africa will blossom into philanthropic and financial successes, and me who say it cannot do so but must result in making West Africa a debt-ridden curse to England. All I can say for myself is that I am animated by no dislike to any set of men and without one farthing’s financial interest in West Africa. It would not affect my income if you were to put 100 per cent. ad valorem duty on every trade article in use on the Coast and flood the Coast with officials, paid as men should be paid who have to go there, namely, at least three times more than they are at present. My dislike to the present state of affairs is solely a dislike to seeing my country, to my mind, make a fool of herself, wasting men’s lives in the process and deluding herself with the idea that the performance will repay her.

Personally, I cannot avoid thinking that before you cast yourself in a whole-souled way into developing anything you should have a knowledge of the nature of the thing as it is on scientific lines. Education and development unless backed by this knowledge are liable to be thrown away, or to produce results you have no use for. I remember a distressing case that occurred in West Africa and supports my opinion. A valued friend of mine, a seaman of great knowledge and experience, yet lacking in that critical spirit which inquires into the nature of things before proceeding with them, confident alone in the rectitude of his own intentions, bought a canary bird at a Canary Island. He knew that the menwho sell canaries down there are up to the sample description of deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So he brought to bear upon the transaction a deal of subtlety, but neglected fundamental facts, whereby his triumph at having, on the whole, done the canary seller brown by getting him to take in part value for the bird a box of German colonial-grown cigars, was vanity. For weeks that gallant seaman rubbed a wet cork up and down an empty whisky bottle within the hearing of the bird, which is the proper thing to do providing things are all right in themselves, and yet nothing beyond genial twitterings rewarded his exertions. So he rubbed on for another week with even greater feeling and persuasive power, and then, to drop a veil upon this tragedy of lost endeavour, that canary laid an egg. Now, if that man had only attended to the nature of things and seen whether it were a cock or hen bird, he would not have been subjected to this grievous disappointment. Similarly, it seems to me, we are, from the governmental point of view, like that sea captain—swimming about in the West African affair with a lot of subtle details, in an atmosphere of good intentions, but not in touch with important facts; we are acting logically from faulty premises.

Now, let us grant that the Crown Colony system is not fully developed in West Africa, for if it were, you may say, it would work all right; though this I consider a most dangerous idea. Let us see what it would be if it were fully developed.

Mr. St. Loe Strachey[60]thus defines Crown Colonies:—“These are possessions which are for the most part peopled by non-European races of dark colour, and governed not by persons elected by themselves, but by a governor andother officials sent out from England. The reason for this difference is a very simple one. Those colonies which are peopled by men of English and European races can provide themselves with a better government than we can provide them with from here. Hence they are given responsible governments.

“Those colonies in which the English or European element is very small can best be governed, it is found, by the Crown Colony system. The native, dark-skinned population are not fit to govern themselves—they are too ignorant and too uncivilised, and if the government is left entirely in the hands of the small number of whites who may happen to live in the colony, they are apt not to take enough care of the interests of the coloured inhabitants. The simplest form of the Crown Colony is that found in some of the smaller groups of islands in the West Indies. Here a governor is sent out from England, and he—helped by a secretary, a judge, and other officials—governs the island, reporting his actions to the Colonial Office, and consulting the able officials there before he takes important steps. In most cases, however, the governor has a council, either nominated from among the principal persons in the colony, or else elected by the inhabitants. In some cases—Jamaica or Barbadoes, for example—the council has very great power, and the type of government may be said to approach that of the self-governing colonies.”

Now, in West Africa the system is the same as that “found in some of the smaller groups of the West Indian islands,” although these West African colonies have each a nominated council of some kind. I should hesitate to say, however, “to assist the governor.” Being nominated by him they can usually manage to agree with him; it is onlyanother hindrance or superfluous affair. Before taking any important steps the West African governor is supposed to consult the officials at the Colonial Office; but as the Colonial Office is not so well informed as the governor himself is, this can be no help to him if he be a really able man, and no check on him if he be not an able man. For, be he what he may, he is the representative of the Colonial Office; he cannot, it is true, persuade the Colonial Office to go and involve itself in rows with European continental powers, because the Office knows about them; but if he is a strong-minded man with a fad he can persuade the Colonial Office to let him try that fad on the natives or the traders, because the Colonial Office does not know the natives nor the West African trade.

You see, therefore, you have in the Governor of a West African possession a man in a bad position. He is aided by no council worth having, no regular set of experts; he is held in by another council equally non-expert, except in the direction of continental politics. He may keep out of mischief; he could, if he were given either time or inducement to study the native languages, laws, and general ethnology of his colony, do much good; but how can he do these things, separated from the native population as he necessarily is, by his under officials, and with his time taken up, just as every official’s time is taken up under the Crown Colony system, with a mass of red-tape clerkwork that is unnecessary and intrinsically valueless? I do not pretend to any personal acquaintance with English West African Governors. I only look on their affairs from outside, but I have seen some great men among them. One of them who is dead would, I believe, had the climate spared him, have become a man whom every one interested in WestAfrica would have respected and admired. He came from a totally different region, the Straits Settlements. He found his West African domain in a lethargic mess, and he hit out right and left, falling, like the rain, on the just and the unjust. I do not wish you to take his utterances or his actions as representing him; but from the spirit of them it is clear he would have become a great blessing to the Coast had he but lived long enough. I am aware he was unpopular from his attempts to enforce the ill-drafted Land Ordinance, but primarily responsible for this ill-judged thing he was not.

In addition to Sir William Maxwell there have been, and are still, other Governors representative of what is best in England; but, circumstanced as they are under this system, continually interrupted as their work is by death or furloughs home, neither England nor West Africa gets one-tenth part of the true value of these men.

In addition to the Governor, there are the other officials, medical, legal, secretarial, constabulary, and customs. The majority of these are engaged in looking after each other and clerking. Clerking is the breath of the Crown Colony system, and customs what it feeds on. Owing to the climate it is practically necessary to have a double staff in all these departments,—that is what the system would have if it were perfect; as it is, some official’s work is always being done by a subordinate; it may be equally well done, but it is not equally well paid for, and there is no continuity of policy in any department, except those which are entirely clerk, and the expense of this is necessarily great. The main evil of this want of continuity is of course in the Governors—a Governor goes out, starts a new line of policy, goes home on furlough leaving in charge the ColonialSecretary, who does not by all means always feel enthusiastic towards that policy; so it languishes. Governor comes back, goes at it again like a giant refreshed, but by no means better acquainted with local affairs for having been away; then he goes home again, or dies, or gets a new appointment; a brand new Governor comes out, he starts a new line of policy, perhaps has a new Colonial Secretary into the bargain; anyhow the thing goes on wavering, not advancing. The only description I have heard of our policy in West African Colonies that seems to me to do it justice is that given by a medical friend of mine, who said it was a coma accompanied by fits.

Of course this would not be the case if the Colonial Office had a definite detailed policy of its own, and merely sent out men to carry it out; but this the Colonial Office has not got and cannot have, because it has not got the scientific and commercial facts of West Africa in its possession. It has therefore to depend on the Governors it sends out; and these, as aforesaid, are men of divers minds. One Governor is truly great on drains; he spends lots of money on them. Another Governor thinks education and a cathedral more important; during his reign drains languish. Yet another Governor comes along and says if there are schools wanted they should be under non-sectarian control, but what is wanted is a railway; and so it goes on, and of course leads to an immense waste of money. And this waste of money is a far more serious thing than it looks; for it is from it that the policy has arisen, of increasing customs dues to a point that seriously hampers trade development, and the far more serious evil of attempting directly as well as indirectly to tax the native population.

I am bound to say I believe any ordinary Englishmanwould be fairly staggered if he went out to West Africa and saw what there was to show for the expenditure of the last few years in our Crown Colonies there,[61]and knew that all that money had been honestly expended in the main, that none of it had been appropriated by the officials, that they had only had their pay, and that none too great.

But, you will say, after all, if West Africa is as rich as it is said to be, surely it can stand a little wasteful expenditure, and support an even more expensive administration than it now has. All I can say is, that it can stand wasteful expenditure, but only up to a certain point, which is now passed; it would perhaps be more true to say it could stand wasteful expenditure before the factor of the competition of French and German colonies alongside came in; and that a wasteful expenditure that necessitates unjust methods of raising revenue, such as direct taxation on the natives, is a thing West Africa will not stand at all. Of course you can do it; you can impose direct taxation on the native population, but you cannot make it financially pay to do so; for one thing, the collection of that tax will require a considerable multiplication of officials black and white, the black section will by their oppressive methods engender war, and the joint body will consume more than the amount that can be collected. From a fiscal standpoint direct taxation of a non-Mohammedanised or non-Christianised community is rank foolishness, for reasons known to every ethnologist. As for the natural riches of West Africa, I am a profound believer in them, and regard West Africa, taken as a whole, as one of the richest regions inthe world; but, as Sir William Maxwell said, “I am convinced that, from causes wholly unpreventable, West Africa is and must remain a place with certain peculiar dangers of its own”[62]; therefore it requires most careful, expert handling. It is no use your trying to get its riches out by a set of hasty amateur experiments; it is no use just dumping down capital on it and calling these goings on “Developing the resources,” or “Raising the African in the plane of civilisation;” because these goings on are not these things, they are but sacrifices on the altars of folly and idleness.

Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance.

Sir William Maxwell, when he referred to “causes wholly unpreventable,” was referring mainly to the unhealthiness of West Africa. There seems no escape from this great drawback. Every other difficulty connected with it one can imagine removable by human activity and ingenuity—even the labour difficulty—but, I fear, not so the fever. Although this is not a thing to discourage England from holding West Africa, it is a thing which calls for greater forethought in the administration of it than she need give to a healthy region. In a healthy region it does not matter so much whether there is an excess over requirements in the number of men employed to administer it, but in one with a death rate of at least 35 per cent. of white men it does matter.

I confess it is this excessive expenditure of men which I dislike most in the Crown Colony system, though I know it cannot help it; it is in the make of the thing. If these men were even employed in some great undertaking it would be less grievous; but they are many of them entirely taken up with clerk work, and all of them have to waste a large percentage of their time on it. Some of the men undoubtedly get to like this, but it is a morbid taste. I know one of our possessions where the officials even carry on their personal quarrels with each other on government paper in a high official style, when it would be better if they put aside an hour a week and went and punched each other’s heads, and gave the rest of their time to studying native law and languages and pottering about the country getting up information on it at large, so that the natives would become familiarised with the nature of Englishmen first-hand, instead of being dependent for their knowledge of them on interpreters and the set of subordinate native officials and native police.

I wish that it lay in my power to place before you merely a set of figures that would show you the present state of our West African affairs, but such figures do not exist. Practically speaking, there are no reliable figures for West African affairs. They are not cooked, but you know what figures are—unless they be complete and in their proper stations, they are valueless.

The figures we have are those which appear in “The Colonial Annual Series” of reports. These are not annual; for example, the Gold Coast one was not published for three years; but no matter, when they are published they are misleading enough, unless you know things notmentioned in them but connected with them. However, we will just run through the figures published for one West African Crown Colony. For many reasons I am sorry to have to take those regarding Sierra Leone, but I must, as at present they are the most correct available.

Now the element of error which must be allowed for in these arises from the proximity of the French colony of French Guinea, which is next door to Sierra Leone. That colony has been really developing its exports. Goods have, up to last year, come out through our colony of Sierra Leone, and have been included with the exports of Sierra Leone itself, though Sierra Leone has not dwelt on this interesting fact. And, equally, since 1890 goods going into French Guinea have gone in through Sierra Leone, and though traceable with care, have been put in with the total of the imports. So you see it is a little difficult to find out whether it has been French Guinea or Sierra Leone that has really been doing the trade mentioned in the figures.

Nevertheless, it has been customary to take these joint, mixed up figures and get happy over “the increase of trade in Sierra Leone during the past ten year$1”;dquo;; but a little calm consideration will prevent you from falling into this idle error.

Personally I think that if you are cautious you will try and estimate the trade by the exports; for among the imports there are Government stores, railway material, &c., things that will have some day to be paid for, because it is the rule not to assist a colony under the system until it has been reduced to a West Indian condition; whereas the exports give you the buying power of the colony, and show the limits of the trade which may be expected tobe done under existing conditions. Now, the annual total exports during the five years ending—

1875,amounted in value to,£396,7091880,"""£368,8551885,"""£386,8481890,"""£333,3901895,"""£435,175

These figures show for the twenty-five years an increase of less than 10 per cent., or about ½ per cent, per annum; and this is not so very thrilling when one comes to think that that 10 per cent., and probably more, is showing the increase in the trade not of Sierra Leone, but of French Guinea, and remembers that in 1874 the exports were £481,894, an amount they have not since touched.

Then again even in error you are never quite sure if your Colonial Annual is keeping line; sometimes you will get one by a careful conscientious secretary who takes no end of trouble, and tells you lots of things which you would like to hear about next year, only next year you don’t. For example, in Sierra Leone affairs the report for 1887 gave you the imports for consumption in the colony, while that of 1896 represented the total imports, including those afterwards shipped to French Guinea and elsewhere; and again, in estimating the value of the imports Gambia adds the cost of freight and insurance to the invoice value of imports, and the cost of package to the declared value of exports. So far, only Gambia does this, but at any moment an equally laudable spirit might develop in one of the other colonies, and cause further distraction to the student of their figures.

Besides these clerking errors of omission, there is aconstant unavoidable error arising from the so-called smuggling done by the native traders in the hinterland. Remember that colonies which you see neatly enough marked on a map of West Africa with French, English, German, are not really each surrounded by a set of Great Walls of China. For example, under the present arrangement with France, if France keeps to that beautiful Article IX. in the Niger Convention and does not tax English goods more than she at present taxes French goods on the Ivory coast—cottons of English manufacture will be able to be sold 10 per cent. cheaper in the French territory than in the adjacent English Gold Coast.

Up to the present time it has paid the native hinterland trader to come down into the Gold Coast and buy his cotton goods, for English cottons suit his West African markets better than other makes, that is to say they have a higher buying power; and then he went down into the French Ivory Coast and bought his spirits and guns, which were cheaper there because of lower duty. Having got his selection together he went off and did business with the raw material sellers, and sold the raw material he had purchased back to the two Coasts from which he had bought his selection, sending the greater part of it to the best market for the time being. Now you have changed that, or, rather, you have given France the power to change it by selling English cottons cheaper than they can be sold in your own possessions, and thereby rendered it unnecessary for the hinterland traders to buy on the Gold Coast at all. It will remain necessary for him to buy on the Ivory Coast, for spirits and guns he must have; and if he can get his cottons at the same place as he gets these, so much the better for him. It is doubtful, however, whether henceforthit will be worth his while to come down and sell his raw material in your possessions at all. He may browse around your interior towns and suck the produce out of them, but it will be to the enrichment of the French colony next door; and, of course, as things are even now, this sort of thing, which goes on throughout all the various colonies of France, England, Germany and Portugal, does not tend to give true value to the official figures concerning trade published by any one of them.

I have no intention, however, of dwelling on the various methods employed by native smugglers with a view to aiding their suppression. It may be a hereditary taint contracted by my ancestors while they sojourned in Devon, it may be private personal villainy of my own; but anyhow, I never feel, as from an official standpoint I ought, towards smugglers. I do not ask you to regard the African native trader as a sweet innocent who does not realise the villainy of his doings,—he knows all about it; but only once did I feel harshly towards him over smuggling. A native trader had arranged to give me a lift, as it were, in his canoe, and I noticed, with a flattered vanity and a feeling of gratitude, how very careful he had been to make me quite comfortable in the stern, with a perfect little nest of mats and cloths. When we reached our destination and that nest was taken to pieces, I saw that what you might call the backbone of the affair was three kegs of gunpowder, a case of kerosine, and some packages of lucifer matches. That rascal fellow black, as Barbot would call him, had expected we should meet the customs patrol boat, and, basely encroaching on the chivalry of the white man towards the white woman judged that I and my nest would not be overhauled. If there had been a guardian cherub for the Brussels Convention or for Customs doubtless I should have been blown skyhigh and have afforded material for a moral tale called “The Smuggler’s Awful End,” but there are no cherubs who watch over Customs or the Brussels Convention in West Africa and I have no intention of volunteering for such an appointment.

But to return to the Sierra Leone finances and the relationship which the expenditure of that colony bears to the revenue. The increase in the imports is apparently the thing depended on to justify the idea that as the trade has increased the governmental expenditure has a right to do so likewise. The imports increase in 1896 is given as £90,683. From this you must deduct for railway material, £26,000, and for the increased specie import, £19,591, which leaves you an increase of imports of £45,092 from 1887-1896, and remember a good percentage of this remainder of £45,092 belongs to French Guinea.

Now the expenditure on the government of Sierra Leone has increased from £58,534 in 1887 to £116,183, being an increase at the rate of 99.1 per cent., whereas the exports during the same period have increased at the rate of 34.8 per cent, or from £333,157 to £449,033.

In other words, whereas in 1887 the government expenditure amounted to 17.5 per cent, the exports in 1896 amounted to 25.4 per cent. The sum of £40,579 of this increase is credited to police, gaols, transport, and public works;[63]and if this is to be the normal rate ofincrease, the prospects of the colony are serious; for it contains no rich mineral deposit as far as is at present known, nor are there in it any great native states. As far as we know, Sierra Leone must for an immense period depend on bush products collected by the natives, whose trade wants are only a few luxuries. For it must be remembered that in all these West African colonies there is not one single thing Europeans can sell to the natives that is of the nature of a true necessity, a thing the natives must have or starve. There is but one thing that even approaches in the West African markets to what wheat is in our own—that thing is tobacco. Next in importance to it, but considerably lower, is the group of trade articles—gunpowder, guns, and spirits, next again salt, and below these four staples come Manchester goods and miscellanies; the whole of the rest that lies in the power of civilisation to offer to the West African markets are things that are luxuries, things that will only be purchased by the native when he is in a state of prosperity. This subject I have, however, endeavoured to explain elsewhere.[64]

We have for Sierra Leone, fortunately, a scientific authority to refer to on this matter of the natural resources of the country, and the amount of the natural riches we may presume we can take into account when arranging fiscal matters. This authority is the report of Mr. Scott-Elliott on the district traversed by the Anglo-French Boundary Commission.[65]

Regarding mineral, the report states “that the onlymineral of importance is iron, of which the country appears to contain a very large amount. There is a particularly rich belt of titaniferous iron ore in the hills behind Sierra Leone.”

Titaniferous iron is an excellent thing in its way, and good for steel making; but it exists nearer home and in cheaper worked regions than Sierra Leone.

The soil is grouped by the report into three classes:

“1. That of the plateaux and hills above 2,000, or sometimes descending to 1,000 feet, which is due to the disintegration of gneiss and granite rocks.

“2. The red laterite which covers almost invariably all the lower hills from the sea level to 1,000 or 2,000 feet.

“3. The alluvium, due either to the action of the mangroves along the coast, or to rivers and streams inland.”

These soils are capable of and do produce fine timber, rubber, oil and rice, and the general tropical food stuffs, but these, except the three first, are not very valuable export articles. Whether it is possible to enhance the agricultural value of the alluvium regions by growing tobacco, jute, coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar, for export, is by some authorities regarded as doubtful on account of the labour problem; but at any rate, if these industries were taken in hand on a large scale, a scale sufficient materially to alter the resources of a West African colony, they would require many years of fostering, and it would be long before they could contribute greatly to the resources of such a colony as Sierra Leone, in the face of the organised production and cheaper labour, wherewith the supply now in the markets of Europe could be competed with.

I have had the advantage of associating with German and Portuguese and French planters of coffee and cocoa.These are the planters who up to the present have been the most successful in West Africa. I do not say because they are better men, but because they have better soils and better labour than there is in our colonies. By these gentlemen I have been industriously educated in soils, &c.; and from what I have learnt about this matter I am bound regretfully to say that most of the soil of the English possessions is not really rich, taken in the main. There are in places patches of rich soil; and the greater part of our soil will be all the better this day 10,000 years hence; but at present the soil is mainly sour clay, slime and skin soils, skin soils over rock, skin soils over sour clay, skin soils over water-logged soil. We have, alas, not got the rich volcanic earth of Cameroon, Fernando Po, and San Thome and Principe. The natives who work the soil understand it fairly well, and negro agriculture is in a well-developed state, and their farms are most carefully tended and well kept. The rule along the Bight of Benin and Biafra is to change the soil of the farm at least every third year; this they do by cutting down a new bit of bush, burning the bush on the ground at the end of the dry season, and planting the crops. The old farm is then allowed to grow bush or long grass, whichever the particular district goes in for, until the time comes to work back on that piece of land again, when the bush which has grown is in its turn cut down and the ground replanted. This burning of the trees or grass is clearly regarded by the native agriculturist as manuring; it is practically the only method of manuring available for them in a country where cattle in quantities are not kept. It is a wasteful way with timber and rubber growing on the ground of course; but not so wildly wasteful as it looks, for your Negro agriculturist does not go tomake his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate, you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.

The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra, which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are, the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguishagriculture, at any rate, a sufficient agriculture to support the local population; and it is not too much to say you can read on the face of the Accra plain famines to come. There is little reason to doubt that both the African deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari, are advancing towards the Equator. Round Loanda you come across a sand-logged region of some fifty square miles, where you get the gum shed by forests that have gone, humanly speaking, never to return; human agency is largely responsible, it is like sawing the branch of a tree partially through, and then the wind breaks it off. Forest destruction in lands adjacent to deserts is the same thing; the forest is destroyed to a certain extent, an extent that diminishes the rainfall and makes it unable to resist the desert winds, and then—finis.

In the regions of the double rains in the great forest belt of Africa things are different, so you cannot generalise for West Africa at large in this matter. It is one thing for forest destruction to go on in the Gold Coast, quite another for it to go on in Calabar or Congo Français, where men fight back the forest as Dutchmen fight the sea.

But I apologise. This, you will say, is not connected with Governmental expenditure, &c.; but it is to me a more amusing subject, and indirectly has a bearing; for example, Government expenditure in the direction of instituting a Forestry Department would be right enough in some regions, but unnecessary in others.

To return to this agriculture in Sierra Leone. Well, it is, like all West African agriculture, spade husbandry. It is concerned with the cultivation of vegetables for human consumption alone. In the interior of Sierra Leone and throughout the Western Soudan, for which Sierra Leone was once a principal port, there is a fair cattle country,and an old established one, as is shown by the exports of hides mentioned in the writers of the seventeenth century. Yet it would be idle for the most enthusiastic believer in West Africa to pretend that the Western Soudan is coming on to compete with Argentina or Australia in the export of frozen meat; the climate is against it, and therefore this cattle country can only be represented in trade in a hide and horn export. Wool—as the sheep won’t wear it, preferring hair instead and that of poor quality—need not I think be looked forward to from West Africa at all.

I have taken the published accounts of Sierra Leone, because, as I have said, they are the most complete. They are also, in the main, the most typical. It is true that Sierra Leone has not the gold wealth, nor the developing timber industry of the Gold Coast; but if you ignore French Guinea, and include the things belonging to it with the Sierra Leone totals, you will get a fairly equivalent result. Lagos has not yet shown a mineral export, but it and the Gold Coast have shown of late years an immensely increased export of rubber. Rubber, oil, and timber are the three great riches of our West African possessions, the things that may be relied on, as being now of great value and capable of immense expansion. But these things can only be made serviceable to the markets of the world and a source of riches to England by the co-operation of the natives of the country. In other words, you must solve the labour problem on the one hand, and increase the prosperity of the native population on the other, in order to make West Africa pay you back the value of the life and money already paid for her. This solution of the labour problem and this co-operation of the natives with you, the Crown Colony system will never gain for you, because itis too expensive for you and unjust to them, not intentionally, not vindictively nor wickedly, but just from ignorance. It destroys the native form of society, and thereby disorganises labour. It has no power of re-organising it. You hear that people are leaving Coomassie and Benin, instead of flocking in to those places, as they were expected to after the destruction of the local tyrannies. English influence in West Africa, represented as it now is by three separate classes of Englishmen, with no common object of interest, or aim in policy, is not a thing capable of re-organising so difficult a region. I have taken the Sierra Leone figures because, as I have said, they are the most complete and typical, and the state of the trade and the expenditure on the Government are those prior to the hut tax war. So they cannot be ascribed to it, nor can the plea be lodged that the expenditure was an enforced one. These figures merely show you the thing that led up to the hut tax war and the heavy enforced expenditure it has and will entail, and my reason for detaining you with them is the conviction that a similar policy pursued in our other colonies will lead to the same results—the destruction of trade and the imposition on the colonies of a debt that their natural resources cannot meet unless we are prepared to go in for forced labour and revert to the slave trade policy.

It seems clear enough that our present policy in the Crown Colonies, of a rapidly increasing expenditure in the face of a steadily falling trade, must necessarily lead our Government to seek for new sources of revenue beyond customs dues. New sources under our present system can only be found in direct taxation of the native population; the result of this is now known.

I will not attempt to deal fully with the figures wepossess for our remaining Crown Colonies in Western Africa,—Gambia, the Gold Coast, and Lagos,—but merely refer to a few points regarding them that have so far been published. When the result of the policy pursued in these colonies leads to the inevitable row, and the figures are dealt with by competent men, there is, to my mind, no doubt that a state equal to that of Sierra Leone as a fool’s paradise will be discovered; and the deplorable part of the thing is, that the trade palavers of the Chambers and the Colonial Office will give to hasty politicians the idea that West Africa is not worthy of Imperial attention, and large quantities of the blame for this failure of our colonies will be put down quite unjustly to French interference. That French interference has troubled our colonies there, no one will attempt to deny; or that if it had been acting on them when they were in a healthy state it would merely have had a tonic effect, as it has had on the Royal Niger Company’s territories; but, acting on the Crown Colonies in their present state, French influence has naturally been poisonous. Even I, not given to sweet mouth as I am, shrink from saying what has been the true effect on the Crown Colonies of England of the policy pursued by us towards French advance. This only will I say, that the French policy is no discredit to France. Regarding the financial condition of Gambia it is not necessary for us to worry ourselves. Gambia is a nuisance to France. She loves to have high dues, and she cannot have them round Gambia way. She has had to encyst it, or it would be to her Senegal and French Guinea possessions a regular main to lay on smuggling. Knowing this she has encysted it; it pays better to smuggle from French Guinea into Gambia or Sierra Leone than from Gambia or Sierra Leone intothe French possessions. This is a grave commercial position for us, but to it is largely owing the advance of the prosperity of these French possessions during the past three years.

The Gold Coast has on the west a French possession, the Ivory Coast, on the east the German Togoland. Togo is a narrow strip, and to its east and surrounding it to the north is the French colony of Dahomey, whose recent expansion has told heavily on its next-door neighbours, both Togo and the English colony to the east, Lagos. I give below the latest available figures for the foreign West African possessions.[66]

Unfortunately there are no figures available for the French Sudan which would represent the real value of the trade; the total value of trade is, however, considerable. You must remember that in dealing with French colonies you are dealing with those of a nation not gifted with commercial intelligence; and that, in spite of the perpetual hampering of trade in French colonies, the granting of concessions to French firms who have not the capital to work them, but are only able to prevent any one else doing so, the high differential tariffs, in some cases 100 per cent., which up to the present time have been levied on English goods, &c.; the English traders nevertheless work in the markets of the French colonies, and work mainly on French goods. Of the £117,518 representing the Ivory Coast trade for the first quarter of this year, over £76,000 was English trade, and of the Dahomey £156,835 for the same period, £131,705. In reading the imports figures for these French colonies in Upper Guinea, you must remember that those imports include material for the well directed, unamiable intention of France to cut us off from what she regards as her own Western Soudan; it is a form of investment far more profitable than our expenditure on railways, gaols, prisons, and frontier police. It is one that, presuming this highly unlikely thing—France becoming commercially intelligent—would any year now enable her entirely to pocket the West African trade down to Lagos from Senegal. She may do it at any moment, though it is a very remote possibility. So we will return to the Gold Coast finances, though our authorities on them are at present meagre.

In 1892 the Gold Coast government was financially in a flourishing condition. On the 1st of January, 1891, therewas a sum of £75,181 4s.4d.standing to the credit of the colony, which was increased to £127,796 2s.3d.on the 1st of January, 1892, and to £152,766 16s.7d.on the 1st of January, 1893, and the colony had no public debt. There was no native direct taxation. The Customs dues were lower than they are now. The extremely careful official who drew up the report shows evidence of realising that Customs represent an indirect taxation on the native population, for he says: “In Sierra Leone and Lagos the taxation per head is very much higher (than 2s.5d.per head), in the former nine times, and in the latter seven times.”[67]However, in all three colonies, apart from the attempts at direct taxation, the indirect taxation on the native has considerably increased by now.

The report for 1894 shows the colony still progressing rapidly, the trade of it amounting in value to £1,663,173 19s.9d., of which £812,830 8s.10d.represented the imports, and £850,343 10s.11d.the exports. The expenditure showed a large increase as compared with previous years. It amounted to £226,931 19s.4d., being £8,670 13s.7d.in excess of the revenue for the year, and £47,997 7s.11d.more than in 1893. The principal items of increase were public works, upon which the sum of £54,163 0s.3d.was spent, and the expedition in defence of the protected district of Attabubu against an Ashanti invasion, which cost £10,778 11s.The Gold Coast assets on 31st of December, 1894, stood at £166,944 8s.7d.[68]Then came the last Ashanti war, regarding which I beg to refer you to Dr. Freeman’s book.[69]No one can deny that he has both experience and intelligence enough to justify himin offering his opinion on the matter. I entirely accept his statements from my knowledge of native affairs elsewhere in West Africa. Anyhow, the last Ashanti war absorbed a good deal of the assets of the Gold Coast. There is no published authority to cite, but I do not think there is an asset now standing to the credit of the Gold Coast Colony, unless it be a loan.

The income for the Gold Coast Colony in 1896 was £237,460 6s.7d., the expenditure £282,277 15s.9d.The exports £792,111, against £877,804 in 1895; but the imports were £910,000, against £981,537. Since 1896 the Customs dues have risen; but,per contra, the expenditure has also risen, in consequence of the expenses arising from the occupation of Ashanti, and the Gold Coast railway. The occupation of Ashanti and the railway must be looked on in the light of investments—investments that will be profitable or unprofitable, according to their administration, which one must trust will be careful, for they are both things you cannot just dump your money down on and be done with, for the up-keep expenses of both are necessarily large.

The subject of West African railways is one that all who are interested in the future of our possessions there should study most carefully, for two main reasons. Firstly, that there is possibly no other way in which money can be spent so unprofitably and extensively as on railways in such a region. Secondly, because railways are in several districts there—districts with no water carriage possibilities—simply essential to the expansion of trade. In other words, if you make your railway through the right district, in the right way, it is a thing worth having, a sound investment. If you do not, it is a thing you are better without;not an investment, but an extravagance. The cost of its construction must fall on the colony, alike in money and the distraction, from ordinary trade, of the local labour supply. In both countries the cost of a railway out there is necessarily great. I hastily beg to observe I am not aiming at a rivalry with Martin Tupper in saying this, but am only driven to it by so many people in their haste saying “Oh, for goodness gracious sake! let the Government make a railway anywhere; it’s done little enough for us, and any railway is better than none.”

There has been considerable difficulty over the Gold Coast Railway already, though it is only just now entering on the phase of actual existence. Surveys have been made for it in all directions. Surveys are expensive things out there. But the general idea the Government gave the Chambers of Commerce was that, at any rate, this railway was to run up into Ashanti, and be a great general trade artery for the Colony. The other day Manchester found out, quite unexpected like, that the Government whose affections Commerce had regarded as safely and properly set on the hinterland trade was off, if you please, flirting round the corner with a group of gold mines at Tarquah, and intended, nay, was even then proceeding with the undertaking of running the one and only Gold Coast railway just up to Tarquah, and no further, until this section paid. Manchester, very properly shocked at this fickleness in the Government and its heartless abandonment of the hinterland trade, said things, interesting and excited things, in itsGuardian; but, beyond illustrating the truth of the old adage that it’s “well to be off with the old love before you are on with the new,” things of no avail.

This Tarquah railway is estimated to cost £5,000 per mile. It is to be financed by a loan, raised by the Crown Colony Agents, of £250,000. We have ample reason to believe that this £5,000 per mile will not represent one-third of its final cost from demonstrations by the Uganda, Congo Belge, and Senegal railways; more particularly are we so assured from the knowledge that the railway’s construction will be in the hands of nominees of the Crown Agents, whose method of arranging for the construction of these railways is curious. They do not invite tenders for material or freight in the open market, and they do not give the taxed people in the country itself any opportunity for contracting for the supply of as much local material as possible—things it would be alike fair and business-like to do. Exceedingly curious, moreover, is the fact that the nominees of the Crown Agents’ employers are not subject to the control of the local governmental authorities on the Coast, their sole connection with the affair apparently being confined to the passing of ordinances, as per instruction from the Colonial Office, authorising loans for the payment of the debt incurred by making the railway.

There is no doubt that any Gold Coast railway which is ever to pay even for its coal must run through a rich bit of the local gold reefs. Similarly, there is no doubt that the gold mines of the Gold Coast have been terribly kept back by lack of transport facilities for the machinery necessary to work them; but there is, nevertheless, evidently much that is unsound in the present railway scheme. If the charge for it, as some suggest, were to be thrown on the gold mines, it would be as heavy a charge as the old bad transport was, and they would be no less hampered. If, as is most likely, the charge for the railwaybe thrown on the general finance of the colony, it will be a drain on other forms of trade, without in any way improving them; in fact, during its construction, it will absorb labour from the general trade—oil, rubber, and timber—and, if it extensively increases the gold-mining industry, it will keep the labour tied to it chronically, to the disadvantage of other trades.

Lagos, our next Crown Colony, is a very rich possession, and under Sir Alfred Moloney, who discovered the use of the Kicksia Africana as a rubber tree, and Sir Gilbert Carter, who fostered the industry and opened the trade roads, sprang in a few years into a phenomenal prosperity. Then came the French aggression on its hinterland, the seizing of Nikki, which was one of thosefociof trade routes, though possibly, as many have said, a non-fertile bit of country in itself. To give you some idea of the bound up in prosperity made by Lagos, the exports in 1892 were £577,083; in 1895, £985,595. The main advance has been in rubber, which in 1896 was exported from Lagos to the value of £347,721. Early in this year, however, the state of the Lagos trade was considered so unsatisfactory that a local commission to inquire into the causes of this state of affairs was appointed.

The publication of the Government Trade Returns for 1897 supported the long grumble that had been going on about the bad state of trade in Lagos, the imports for 1897 showing a decrease on those of 1895 by £67,474. TheBoard of Trade Journal, quoting from theLagos Weekly Recordof February 28th, 1898, says, “An examination of the export returns affords a clue to the direction of such decrease. It is to be noted that notwithstanding that the export of rubber in 1897 shows an excess of£13,367 above that exported in 1895, yet in the aggregate of the total exports of the two years that of 1897 shows a decrease of £193,745; this is due to the great falling off which is perceptible in the palm oil and kernel trade, which together show a decrease in 1897 of £162,580 as compared with the quantities exported in 1895; while as compared with the exports in 1896 the decrease amounts to £114,773. The returns show a steady and increasing decline in the exports of these products, for while the decrease in 1896 as compared with 1895 was only £47,807, the decrease had risen in 1897 as compared with the previous year to £114,773, as already intimated, which implies that there has been a further falling off of the trade to the extent of nearly £67,000. This manifest excessive diminution in what must be regarded as the staple commodities of the trade is undoubtedly a serious indication, for though these commodities come under the classification of jungle products they are not liable to exhaustion as are the rubber or timber industries, and hence they form the only reliable commodities upon which the trade must expand. The dislocation of the labour system in the hinterland is no doubt responsible in a large measure for the falling off in the yield of these products, while in many instances they have been abandoned for the more remunerative rubber business. But, be the circumstances what they may, it is evident that there has been an actual decrease of trade to the extent of over £114,000.”

This was the state of affairs the local committee was appointed to deal with. Its discussions were long and careful. I will not attempt to drag you through its final report, which a grossly ungrateful public in Lagos sniffed at becauseit merely seemed carefully to reproduce every one’s opinion on the causes of the falling off of trade and to agree with it solemnly; but, like the rest of the local world, it made no sweeping suggestion of means whereby things could be altered. Since the committee, however, was formed, there has been a greater interest taken in expenditure, healthy in its way, but too often ignoring the fact, that it is not so much the amount of money that is spent governmentally that constitutes waste, but the things on which it is expended. Large sums have been spent in Lagos, I am informed, on building a Government House that every valuable Governor ought to be paid to keep out of, so unhealthy is its situation, and again on bridging a lagoon that has no particular sound bottom to it worth mentioning.

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