Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/727

 hang him. Moreover, raising the import dues on liquor may bring into the government a good revenue; but it is a short-sighted policy—for the liquor is the thing there is the best market for in West Africa. The natives have no enthusiasm about cotton-goods, as they seem from some accounts to have in East Central, and the supply of them they now get, and get cheap and good, is as much as they require. And if the question of the abstract morality of introducing clothes, or introducing liquor, to native races, were fairly gone into, the results would be interesting—for clothing native races in European clothes works badly for them and kills them off. Indeed the whole of this question of trade with the lower races is full of curious and unexpected points. Speaking at large, the introduction of European culture—governmental, religious, or mercantile—has a destructive action on all the lower races; many of them the governmental and religious sections have stamped right out; but trade has never stamped a race out when disassociated from the other two, and it certainly has had no bad effect in tropical Africa. With regard to the liquor traffic, try and put yourself in the West African's place. Imagine, for example, that you want a pair of boots. You go into a shop, prepared to pay for them, but the man who keeps the shop says, "My good friend, you must not have boots, they are immoral. You can have a tin of sardines, or a pocket-handkerchief, they are much better for you." Would you take the sardines or the pocket-handkerchiefs? more particularly would you feel inclined to take them instead of your desired boots if you knew there was a shop in a neighbouring street where boots are to be had? And there is a neighbouring shop-street to all our West Coast possessions which is in the hands of either France or Germany.

I do not for a moment deny that the liquor traffic requires regulation, but it requires more regulation in Europe than it does in Africa, because Europe is more given to intoxication. In Africa all that is wanted is that the spirit sent in should be wholesome, and not sold at a strength over 45° below proof. These requirements are fairly well fulfilled already on the West Coast, and I can see no reason for any further restriction or additional impost. If further restrictions in the sale of it are wanted, it is not for interior trade where the natives are not given to excess, but in the larger coast towns, where there is a body of natives who are the débris of the disintegrating process of white culture. But even in those towns like Sierra Leone and Lagos these men are