lacustris). The kernels are sent home in canvas bags, and millions of such bags must be manufactured in Europe and dispatched to Nigeria. There is the handling, haulage, cartage, and distribution of this bulky produce at the European end; its conveyance to the railway depot and the store; its re-shipment to other parts of the world. There are the mills erected to crush the kernels. These details are merely illustrative of the argument already advanced as to the community of interest between the African producers of raw material and the working classes of Europe. The industry of the one feeds the industry of the other.
Reduce the Southern Nigerian communities from the position of producers in their own right of the fruits of the soil and of free traders in that produce, and you make them, in the words of Mr. Thompson, the chief conservator of the Nigerian forests, "slaves on their own land." If the precepts of elementary morality forbid such a policy, so do the principles of elementary common-sense. In these days the latter consideration requires, perhaps, exceptional accentuation.
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The rise and growth of the cocoa industry in the Gold Coast and Ashanti is one of the most romantic episodes in the history of tropical cultivation. If such results had been achieved under the ægis of Europeans, the financial and commercial Press would have taken care to familiarise all of us with the result. But as the enterprise is wholly due to the African farmer, the world, specialists apart, knows little or nothing of it. The "man in the street" continues to accept the interested falsities about the invincible indolence of the "nigger." The real sin of the African native, let it be emphasised once again, is not his indolence, but the fact that he is capable of putting his land to fruitful use, for his own profit, working as his own master. It is this which gravels, as Mark Twain used to say, your exploiting capitalist and your grasping syndicates in Europe. As one of his kind is recently reported to have exclaimed at a public meeting: "It is time the natives were made to understand that they have got to work, not for themselves, but for the white man." Precisely. The entire philosophy of your modern slaver is epitomised in that single sentence.
