be raised to-morrow, the trade would again begin to drain back into the hands of its old owners, the tawny Moors, for the Western Soudan is being pacified by France. If some way is not devised of providing the tawny Moors with trade sufficient to keep them, things must go badly there, owing to the unfertility of the greater part of their country and the increase of the population arising from the pacification of the Western Soudan, which France is effecting. I will dwell no longer on this sketch of the history of the advance of France in Western Africa. We in England cannot judge it fairly. Nationally, her honour there is our disgrace; commercially, her presence is our ruin.
Two things only stand out from these generalisations. The Royal Niger Company shows how great England can be when she is incarnate in a great man, for the Royal Niger Company is so far Sir George Taubman-Goldie. The other thing that stands out unstained by comatose indifference to the worth of West Africa to England is her Commerce as represented by her West Coast traders, who have held on to the Coast since the sixteenth century with a bulldog grip, facing death and danger, fair weather and foul. Fine things both these two things are, but they do not understand each other; they would certainly not understand me regarding their affairs were I to talk from June to January, so I won't attempt to, but speak to the general public, who so far have understood neither Sir George Goldie, nor the West Coast trader, nor for the matter of that their mutual foe France, and I beg to say that France has not been so destructive an enemy to England there as England's own folly has been as incarnate in the parliamentary resolution of 1865; that the achievements of France in exploration in the West-
