Page:West African Studies.djvu/487

 whereby the white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the competition among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders, knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years, who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt, which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against adulteration of produce, &c., and to realise that by gaining these things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed to urge further governmental expenditure.

If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they do, I beg them to