Khartoum's sword, though a sword is an excellent thing. I trust, therefore, you have too much sense to give all honour to the Chartered Company, even when it is a trading company. Trade is an excellent thing, but, in the case of the Royal Niger, this very factor, trade, restricts the man who uses the Chartered Company to a set of white men and a set of black. Therefore, never can I feel that either Liverpool or the Brass men have profited by the R.N.C. as they would have done if there had been a better system available for dealing with what Mr. St. Loe Strachey delicately calls "a dark-skinned population" with an insufficient local white population at hand. Briefly, I should say that the Chartered Company system keeps its "ain fish-guts for its ain sea-maws" too much. Therefore now, when, like many before me who have laboured strenuously to reform, I have given up the idea that reformation is possible for the individual on whom they have expended their powers, and have decided that there are some people whom you can only reform with a gun, I will start reforming myself, and say the Chartered Company system is not good enough, taken all round as things are, for West Africa for these reasons.
First, a Chartered Company consists of a band of merchants, ruling through, and by, a great man. If that great man who expands the influence and power of the Company lives long enough to establish a form of policy, well and good. I have sufficient trust in the common sense of a band of English merchants, provided their interest is common, to believe they will adhere to the policy; but suppose he does not, or suppose you do not start with a good man, you will merely have a mess, as has been demonstrated by the perpetual failures of our French
