basin and Lake Tchad known to the civilized world; and yet we scarcely ever-as a Government-attempted to secure these rich regions to the British Empire. Indeed the little we have saved of the Niger we owe rather to the good-natured indifference of the not sufficiently interested European powers at the Berlin Congress, rather than to any active pushing of the British Ministry then in power. We conquered Ashanti in a manner that very few European Powers could have done, and yet where is our influence in Ashanti now, or rather where was it a year or two ago? The last time I was on the Gold Coast-in 1888-it seemed as likely as not that the French would have had Ashanti for the asking, or the taking. We conquered Abyssinia by a splendid feat of arms, and yet that fine country has been handed over to Italy who never did the like; while as to the millions of money and brave men's lives which from 1799 to 1890 have been spent by Great Britain on Egypt, and the policy of self-abnegation and disinterestedness which has gone hand in hand with these crusades, the less I say perhaps the better. It were better indeed that I should not dilate on governmental errors in the past with regard to Africa, because I should only be wasting the time and the attention you are giving me in raising futile regrets, and also because of late the British Government has almost for the first time in history-supported, maintained, and extended British influence in Africa in such a thoroughgoing way, that it would be rather ungracious to make querulous complaints over the indifference of other years and other Ministries. Indeed it is only the strong and intelligent interest now displayed in African questions by those who guide our destinies that emboldens me to criticise as I have done the dislike to African enterprise which former governments evinced, because I feel that in warmly advocating the extension of British influence over the Dark Continent, I am not uttering an opinion which is dissonant with the views expressed by her Majesty's present advisers. The result of Lord Salisbury's action with regard to Africa during the past twelve months has been stupendons in its effect on the British Empire. He has secured to us gigantic spheres of influence in West, East, Central, and SouthCentral Africa wherein our trade and our Anglo-Saxon civilization may freely de velop without let or hindrance from other European Powers. And this last consideration leads me to an important aspect of the question which I wish to impress on you; and that is that as a general rulecertainly in Africa-the British do not prosper in countries which are under the laws and regulations of other European Powers. For instance, it makes a considerable difference to our merchants and missionaries whether the Niger Delta or the Island of Zanzibar, Nyasaland, Egypt, or Garenganze remain under British influence or pass under the control of another European nation; for all the other nations of Europe are our rivals, in some cases our bitter rivals, and very naturally attempt by all the means in their power to thwart, limit, and oust our political influence, our religion, our teaching, and our trade. Do not let us justify their apprehensions by unreasonable and outrageous demands for territory. Let France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Belgium obtain their fair share of the Dark Continent as a theatre for colonial or commercial expansion-a share in proportion to the population, power, commerce, and industry of each of these countries; but let us be thankful at the same time our Government has recently secured to the British Empire its fair apportionment of Africa, a share not in the least too large if computed by the same rule-of-three sum as that by which the possessions of the other European Powers in Africa have been calculated. Seeing how little our enterprises prospered under the unsympathetic administration of new countries by our European rivals—and you can hardly wonder that these administrations were unfriendly when they found all the commerce in British hands and the natives -we being taught the English language and English ideas by British missionarieswere right to demand that a considerable portion of the Dark Continent should be reserved to Great Britain and secured from the domination of other Powers; but now that we have practically got all or very nearly all that we want, and certainly quite sufficient for our present appetite and digestion, we must resolutely devote ourselves to the thoroughgoing development of these new territories: our duties are not at an end when we have taken a big paint brush and colored red considerable portions of the map of Africa. Having secured these regions for our unfettered action, it is incumbent upon us to take up our stewardship in real earnest. We must teach the poor savages, of whom we have become the guardians, the blessings of peace, the advantages and profits which accrue from hard work, and in course of time and of many generations raise them up to a condition of perfect civilization. We must explore and exploit the undeveloped riches of these lands, so that we may discover and utilize the many oils, drugs, perfumes, food-stuffs, dyes, fibres, gums, woods, timbers, and other products of African vegetation; so that we may maintain and control our supply of African ivory and yet prevent the extermination of the African elephant; so that we may mine the gold and silver and antimony and copper and diamonds of the African rocks and river valleys, fish up the pearls from its oyster beds, and utilize its scarcely touched deposits of coal and mineral oil; so that we may cover its grassy uplands and well watered plateaux with teeming herds of cattle, sheep, horses, and asses, and its arid sandy plains with ostriches and camels; and lastly, so that we may make servants, soldiers, cooks, clerks, carpenters, seamen. craftsmen, herdsmen, agriculturists, fellow-workers, fellow-helpers, friends and equals from among the Arab, Negroid, and Negro races. There are two ways in which we rule Africa at present. One is by the direct Imperial administration of our colonies and protectorates, the other is through the agency of great trading companies whom the Queen charters with governing rights. Seeing that perfect impartiality of rule an impartiality free from the influences of commercial or religious interest-is more likely to be obtained through the administration of officials appointed and employed by the Imperial Government, it would almost seem better that all our African possessions should be directly administered by the British Government in some shape or form; but although I firmly adhere to this as the best theoretical way of controlling our African possessions, it is not always practically possible. A British Parliament which annually grumbles at voting a few thousands a year for British Bechuanaland -a country which is beginning to pay its way-is hardly likely to find several hundred thousand pounds more for the administration of British East Africa, the Niger Protectorate, or Nyasaland. For this you, the stay-at-home British public, who give your votes at elections, are directly responsible, in that you send to Parliament representatives, the majority of whom are ill-instructed in geography, and callously indifferent to the interests of Greater Britain. These, your representatives, do and have done their utmost, with every government that has been in power for the last half-century, to hinder and hamper the extension and maintenance of the British Empire, and therefore it is that we have to be thankful to private enterprise that the greater part of what is colored British on the map of Africa is kept under some sort of British control; and so it is that but for the energy of Lord Aberdare and Sir George Taubman Goldie, Sir William Mackinnon and Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Mr. James Stephenson and others, the Foreign Office would have found it difficult to maintain our rights to the Niger, to the Zanzibar dominions, to the Central Zambesi, or Nyasaland. The least therefore that we can do to these far-sighted enterprising men in return for carrying out with private resources what the British nation might well have afforded to do with a hundredth part of its annual expenditure, is to give them certain rights and privileges in some shape or other which may indemnify them for their expenditure. This also must be said for the rule of these corporations in Africa, that they are freer from responsibility and control than administrations emanating from the Imperial Government, and consequently make better and more persevering pioneers than government officials. Still I believe theoretically that the best rule would be that of men trained to government and paid by the State and dissociated from direct monetary interest in the commerce of the country. But while the Imperial Parliament continues to view with disfavor any considerable advancement of Imperial funds toward the speculative development of Africa, we should be thankful that private enterprise forms chartered companies to make these experiments in Empire. And yet, just think what the nation would gain by the expenditure from national funds of, say, £250,000 a year on the development of Africa. How greatly the trade of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Bristol, Oldham, Burnley, Coventry, Macclesfield, Cardiff, Swansea, Belfast, Newcastle, Northamp ton, Reading, and London would be ex- and missionaries are not able to do much tended by the increased commerce which good in those parts of Africa which are would result from a more effective opening under a foreign flag. Our trade with Britup of Africa! Think of the growing ish West Africa, for instance, amounts to quantities of cotton goods, blankets, cloth, over £5,000,000 in value annually, as comhardware, pottery, soap, agricultural im- pared with only £400,000 which is the plements, sewing machines, gunpowder, amount of the trade we do with the French, boots and shoes, cast-off clothing, needles, German, Belgian, and Portuguese possesknives, scissors, hats, books, guns, boats, sions on that side of the continent. Theresteel rails, locomotives, newspapers, tinned fore the parts of Africa to the development provisions, biscuits, prize cattle, coal, of which I am referring, mean our colonies pianos, harmoniums, fire works, and a hun- in South Africa and on the West African dred other manufactured articles, or pro- coast, our protectorates of the Niger, the ductions of our soil, or triumphs of our Oil Rivers, British South Central Africa, agriculture, which we should export to an and Nyasaland, British East Africa and ever-widening circle of customers in Zanzibar, British Somaliland, and possibly Africa; and of the larger and larger quan- also Egypt. These lands, in the method tities of gold, silver, copper, ivory, pre- of their utilization and development by cious stones, corn, wine, oil, gums, drugs, Great Britain, may be divided into two india-rubber, hides, wax, cotton, indigo, very distinct classes. There are the Britcoffee, cocoa, ebony, teak, and other ish possessions in South Africa, in parts of African products we should receive in re- Nyasaland, and possibly the highlands of turn. Think of the great outlet that East- Equatorial Africa, which are not too ern Africa would prove for the teeming densely peopled by indigenous races, and population of British India, and South- which, by their climate, may be considCentral Africa for our overcrowded British ered suitable for colonization by white Isles. Think of the profitable field West- men; districts, in short, which may beern Africa might become for the com- come other and future homes for the Britmerce of Great Britain and the West In- ish race. Here it is possible to live in dies, and Egypt-where we already have health, and here the climate permits of the an annual trade of nearly £13,000,000 in cultivation of many European products. value-as a highway, a health resort, a But in our other African possessions of a meeting place for our possessions in Europe more tropical character, such as British and Asia. Great as our Indian Empire is West Africa, the Central Zambesi, the it can only employ a half of the intelli- Upper Nile valley, Zanzibar, Somaliland, gent, well-educated British youth who are and Egypt, the conditions are different. anxious to enter Government service. Here, either the unhealthy climate renders Africa, well-developed, can easily find em- permanent European settlement difficult or ployment for the remainder, and when impossible, or, what is really a more seribrought under the same conditions of civ- ous obstacle in such countries as Egypt and ilization and comfort as characterize India the Nile basin, the land is already possessed would prove no more unhealthy or fatal to by a populous race, whom there is neither Europeans than India is at the present excuse nor facility for ousting, and the only time. At the rate at which our Empire reason we are compelled to meddle with is increasing for British rule seems to in- the affairs of countries like these is, not duce greater prolificness and larger families that we want to colonize them, but that among its subjects--we should soon be they are necessary to our political situation able to furnish a considerable body of vol- and to our commerce. In other words, if unteers for Africa without cheating Asia they came under the dominion of another or America of their due, and this should European nation we should be considerably tend to diminish the pressure on the em- the losers, just as, at the present time, ployment market at home. there is scarcely any British trade carried on in French Senegambia, the Gaboon, in Portuguese Angola, or in Mozambique, because the French and Portuguese authorities in those places put on differential duties, and endeavor by every possible means in their power to prevent British traders And now, leaving vague generalizations on one side, I want to deal more in detail with the way in which we should develop Africa-of course I mean by this British Africa-because I firmly believe, and experience shows us, that British merchants from carrying on a profitable commerce, or British missionaries from teaching their religion. In North Africa the French desire to get our commercial treaty with Tunis abrogated, so that they may check the prosperous trade carried on by our fellow-subjects, the Maltese. Therefore, if we allowed France to take Egypt, or if we had permitted the whole of the Niger basin to come under her influence, if we had surrendered Nyasaland to the Portuguese, we might have known what to expect -a gradual extirpation of our missionaries and the chasing away of our trade by a hundred and one actions, legal and illegal, which would have rendered the existence of our merchants and missionaries intolerable. Even in the Congo Free State, where at the time of the Berlin Congress of 1884, optimists thought that, by a number of careful provisions in their treaties, they had secured a kind of international neutral territory, in which everybody might trade or evangelize with the least possible restraints, see how, after all, it will come to the same thing in the end. It will soon be a Belgian colony, and already has power to levy heavy import and export duties; there are tolls here and tolls there, and those numerous restrictions and regulations which seem to be inseparable from the government of all other European nations but our own. Much of this taxation and most of these restrictions are rendered necessary by the increasing development of Belgium's new African possession, because a system of government cannot be carried on without money, nor can a savage country be righteously exploited by white men whose actions are subjected to no control; still, reasonably or unreasonably, British merchants and missionaries are beginning to feel that it is not so easy for them to get on in the Congo Free State as in most parts of British Africa The fault of this incompatibility of temper lies chiefly with ourselves as a nation. We are so cantankerous and selfwilled, so crankily impatient of over-government, that we find it hard to carry on our work under the control of any administration but an Anglo-Saxon one. This being the case, it is now fortunate that we have secured such large tracts of territory, exclusively set apart to British influence in Africa, where we can develop our trade and our civilization after our own fashion, and I would recommend our missionaries It is not necessary that I should say much about the development of healthy South Africa, because you are, most of you, already sufficiently acquainted with the conditions that regulate the evolution of our South African colonies, of the goldmining, diamond-mining, sheep-farming, and ostrich-farming, which form their chief industries. The healthiness of the climate permits thousands and thousands of Britons to go out there and try their fortunes. Here, too, as elsewhere in Africa, nature rapidly points out those who, by their mode of life and constitution, are best fitted to succeed, by rapidly punishing and driving away the unfit. Still, the experiment here is made on a grand scale, and as the people at home have quite decided that the South African climate is healthy, very little heed is paid to the deaths which occur among Europeans. But in tropical British Africa, with the development of which I intend especially to deal in this address, we have to be much more cautious with the men we send out there, because, firstly, the climate has a universally bad reputation, and, consequently, every single death that takes place there among Europeans is trumpeted abroad by Reuter's telegrams, or by the reports of special correspondents; and because the conditions of these countries not being considered so suitable for colonization, white men go out there in much smaller numbers and for more definite purposes. As I have said before, I believe that when tropical Africa is made as civilized and as comfortable as India, its average climate will certainly not be considered-and will not be more unhealthy than that of India, and whether we colonize it or not, in the sense of settling down there and begetting children that will live there after us, or whether we merely spend a proportion of our lives there as planters, missionaries, government officials, or traders, we shall find ourselves more or less taking root in the Dark Continent, as much as our ancestors took root in the West India Islands, or our brothers and sons and cousins to-day are becoming settled in Ceylon or British Guiana. But to attain this end we must really take very much greater pains than we do at present in selecting men for working Africa and by we,' "I mean her Majesty's Government, the great trading corporations, the various missionary societies, and all who act as employers of white men in Africa. There should, indeed, be a special school founded for African employment, just as the Foreign Office has its specially trained service for China, Japan, and Siam. and for the Turkish dominions; just as men in training for the civil service in India also undergo a specified course of teaching. So I should like to see some great African school or university founded where instruction would be given in African languages, in African forestry and natural history, where a thoroughly sober mode of life should be inculcated, where a necessary knowledge of elementary medicine might be acquired, and where aspirants to administrative posts in Africa should be instructed in the proper mode of dealing in firmness and gentleness with uncivilized races. You who send men out to Africa, and you who are desirous of succeeding there when sent, should remember that Europeans ought not to be younger than twenty-one nor older than thirty when commencing their first term of service in the Dark Continent. As a rule middlesized thin men succeed best in maintaining their health and vigor, but a hard and fast rule as to physique cannot be laid down. I hold it as a general principle that short spare men succeed best, but I have known tall men and fat men who have occasionally done surprisingly well; nevertheless, I think all who have had much experience in Africa will agree with me that the greatest number of deaths and the greatest amount of ill-health have occurred among the bulky and the tall. Sobriety of life is an absolute necessity if you wish to live long and well in Africa. In fact, the safest general rule would be to abandon the consumption of all forins of alcohol whatever, from the day that you land on African soil, unless wines, spirits, or beer are actually forced on you by a qualified doctor as a necessary medicine. If you are really ill and are positively ordered to drink some form of alcohol, it should not be drunk until after sundown. Alcohol taken during the daytime in Africa is simply poison to a white man—an insidious poison if you like, and one that often disguises its effects, so that a careless observer might attribute them to other causes-but a deadly poison all the same, and perhaps the more deadly because the punishment it inflicts is not readily recognizable. Unfortunately, especially among the British, alcoholic excess is terribly prevalent; I mean what may be called excess in Africa, but what in England would be looked upon as the allowance of a temperate, sober man. And that is where so many good men go wrong. They cannot be brought to understand that because they do not drink till they get drunk, and because what they are taking for their daily consumption in Africa is not a drop more than they consumed in England, they are nevertheless exceeding, and piling up in their systems a store of poison which will either result in a terribly sudden death or the shattering of their health. Next to alcoholic excess in danger comes gluttony in feeding. This, especially among teetotalers, is a constant source of malady. They, the teetotalers, seem to imagine that because they abstain from alcohol they may gobble as much food as possible; they generally have an inordinate craving for fat, oily substances and sweet things, in all of which they are prone to indulge to such excess that they are rapidly stricken down with a bad form of bilious fever, and then they turn round and ask what you can expect "from such a beastly climate as this?" "Here am I," they say, "who have not for years taken anything stronger than tea, and yet I am as bad as poor So-and-so, who drinks champagne and gin cocktails daily." Excesses in immorality are also a source of danger; but I am glad to say not by any means so prevalent among people of our own nationality as among other European settlers in Africa. The average Briton inherits a certain amount of constitutional chastity. Those who proceed to Africa, besides being young and healthy and temperate, must also be enthusiastic. You need a terrible amount of enthusiasm and zeal to bear up against the depressing influences of the hot climate, and the dreary, uncomfortable life which is the lot of most pio |