Page:West African Studies.djvu/470

 The region I am citing is not so unhealthy for whites as West Africa. Still, it has a stiff death-rate of its own; even nowadays, when it has pulled that death-rate down by Science—a thing, I may remark, you never trouble your head about in West Africa, or think worthy of your serious attention.

I will not insult your knowledge by telling you where this system is working to-day, or who works it, and all that. The same consideration also bars me from applying for a patent for this system; for although I lay it before you altered to what I think suitable for West Africa, the main lines of the system remain. The only thing I confess that makes me shaky about its being applied to West Africa is, that this system requires and must have experts black and white to work it, both at home in England and out in West Africa. Still, you have a sufficient supply of such experts, if only you would not leave things so largely in the hands of clerks and amateurs; who, with the assistance of faddists and renegade Africans, break up the native true Negro culture state, leaving you little sound stuff to work on in the regions now under the Crown Colony system.

Before I proceed to sketch the skeleton of the other system, I must lay before you briefly the present political state of West Africa in the words of the greatest living expert on the subject, as they are given in a remarkable article in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1898.

"The weighty utterance of Sir George Goldie should never be forgotten, 'Central African races and tribes have, broadly speaking, no sentiment of patriotism as understood in Europe.' There is, therefore, little difficulty in inducing them to accept what German jurisconsults term 'Ober