well expect to get the functions of a State, good government, out of these three disconnected classes of Englishmen in Africa, as expect to know the hour of day from the parts of a watch before they were put together.
You will see I have humbly attempted to place this affair before you from no sensational point of view, but from the commercial one—the value of West Africa to England's commerce—and have attempted to show you how this is suffering from the adherence of England to a form of government that is essentially un-English. I have made no attack on the form of government for such regions formulated in England's more intellectual though earlier period of Elizabeth, the Chartered Company system as represented by the Royal Niger Company. I have neither shares in, nor reason to attack the Royal Niger Company, which has in a few years, and during the period of the hottest French enterprise, acquired a territory in West Africa immensely greater than the territory acquired during centuries under the Crown Colony system; it has also fought its necessary wars with energy and despatch, and no call upon Imperial resources; it has not only paid its way, but paid its shareholders their 6 per cent., and its bitterest enemies say darkly, far more. I know from my knowledge of West Africa that this can only have been effected by its wise native policy. I know that this policy owes its wisdom and its success to one man, Sir George Taubman Goldie, a man who, had he been under the Crown Colony system, could have done no more than other men have done who have been Governors under it; but, not being under it, the territories he won for England have not been subjected to the jerky amateur policy of those which are under the Crown Colony system. For nearly twenty years the natives
