say, "It may be so, and again, it mayn't." Anyhow it seems to occur to you as an argument only after the war is begun, though you have known the man some years; and it has not been the ostensible reason for any West African war save those in the Niger Company's territories, which run far enough inland to touch the slave-raiding zone, and which are entirely excluded from my arguments because they have been in the hands of experts on West Africa in war-making and in war-healing.
Our past wars in West Africa, I mean all our wars prior to the hut-tax war, have been wars in order to suppress human sacrifice, to protect one tribe from the aggression of another, and to prevent the stopping of trade by middle-men tribes. These things are things worth fighting for. The necessity we have been under to fight them has largely arisen from our ancestors shirking a little firm-handedness in their generation.
There is very little doubt that, owing to a want of reconstruction after destruction, these wars have not been worth to the Empire the loss of life and money they have cost; but this is nothing against us as fighters nor any real disgrace to our honour, but merely a slur on our intellectual powers in the direction of statecraft. They are wars of a totally different character to those of the hut-tax kind, that arise from aggressions on native property: the only thing in common between them is the strain of poor statecraft. This imperfection, however, exists to a far greater extent in hut-tax war, for to it we owe that general feeling of dislike to the advance of civilisation you now hear referred to. That, to a certain extent, this dislike already exists as the necessary outcome of our policy of late years, and that it will increase yearly, I fear there is very little doubt.
