should also have power to enrol any labour volunteer recruits that might come into the town, provided the chiefs could not show a satisfactory reason against their so doing. This labour army should be divided up into suitably sized gangs, with a head man elected by his gang, and be employed in the transport work required by the Government, or let out by the Government to private individuals requiring labour within the district, or drafted to other English colonies on the Coast, if occasion required, to do certain jobs—I do not say for certain spaces of time, because piece-work is the best system for West Africa. An attempt should be made gradually to induce the hinterland chiefs to adopt the Kru social system, wherein every man serves so many years as a labourer, then, about the age of thirty, joins the army and becomes a compound soldier-policeman, ending up in honour and glory as a local magistrate. But it must be remembered that domestic slavery is not a great institution among the Kru tribes, as it is amongst the hinterland tribes in our colonies; the Kru system could not, therefore, be immediately introduced.
We now come to the question of where the revenue is to come from to support this system. There is no difficulty about that in itself; the difficulty comes in in the method to be employed in its collection. When one has a chartered trading company it is, of course, a simple matter; when you have a Crown Colony it is done by means of the custom-house system. The alternative system, however, is not a chartered company; under it individual firms, so long as they can show sufficient capital and good faith, would work the details of their trade out there as freely and privately as in England. I think every effort should be made to do away in West Africa with the custom-house system as it
