hope he will—survive; for a man who has got the grit in him to go and fight in West Africa for those things worth fighting for—duty, honour and gold—is a man whose death is a dead loss to his country.
The cargoes from West Africa truly may "wives and mithers maist despairing ca' them lives o'men." Yet grievous as is the price England pays for her West African possessions, to us who know the men who risk their lives and die for them, England gets a good equivalent value for it; for she is the greatest manufacturing country in the world, and as such requires markets. Nowadays she requires them more than new colonies. A colony drains annually thousands of the most enterprising and energetic of her children from her, leaving behind them their aged and incapable relations. Moreover, a colony gradually becomes a rival manufacturing centre to the mother country, whereas West Africa will remain for hundreds of years a region that will supply the manufacturer with his raw material, and take in exchange for it his manufactured articles, giving him a good margin of profit. And the holding of our West African markets drains annually a few score of men only—only too often fer ever—but the trade they carry on and develop there—a trade, according to Sir George Baden-Powell, of the annual value of nine millions sterling—enables thousands of men, women and children to remain safely in England, in comfort and pleasure, owing to the wages and profits arising from the manufacture and export of the articles used in that trade.
So I trust that those at home in England will give all honour to the men still working in West Africa, or rotting in the weed-grown, snake-infested cemeteries and the forest swamps—men whose battles have been fought out on lonely beaches far away from home and friends and often from another white man's help, sometimes with savages, but more often with a more deadly foe, with none of the anodyne to death and danger given by the companionship of hundreds of fellow soldiers in a fight with a foe you can see, but with a foe you can see only incarnate in the dreams of your delirium, which runs as a poison in burning veins and aching brain—the dread West Coast fever. And may England never again dream of forfeiting, or playing with, the conquests won for her by those heroes of commerce, the West Coast traders; for of them, as well as of such men as Sir Gerald Portal, truly it may be said—of such is the Kingdom of England.
