the natives for other than police services and the defence of territory, and will also secure equal opportunities for the trade and commerce of other members of the League." We will examine these conditions seriatim.
"Freedom of conscience and religion, subject to the maintenance of public order and morals." Here, indeed, is a prodigious safeguard for native rights! The phrase is merely an echo of the old formulæ of the Berlin Act of 1885. All that it means is that European Catholic missionaries shall not be favoured by the administrative Power at the expense of Protestant missionaries, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with the natives. "The prohibition of abuses such as the Slave trade, the arms traffic, and the liquor traffic." Here, again, is much solemn make-believe. The old-fashioned Slave trade is a thing of the past. The so-called internal Slave trade which the natives have to fear to-day does not arise from internecine warfare and the ensuing sale of prisoners of war, but from the acts of European governments. These are never, of course, described as "Slave trade": we find other and less repulsive terms for them. Prohibition of the "arms traffic" is a measure of European, not of native interest; it naturally does not suit European Administrations in Africa that the native population should purchase weapons of precision, licitly or illicitly. But it does suit the French Government that hundreds of thousands of African natives should have rifles placed in their hands, and should be taught how to use them against the enemies of the French Government. As regards the liquor traffic, its prohibition is a salutary measure; but an ineffective one if the prohibition is not universally applied to whites as well as blacks. Where liquor has become by long usage a recognised article of trade and large revenues are raised by taxes upon the import, prohibition can only be just and salutary provided it be not accompanied by administrative measures of direct taxation to supply the equivalent revenue lost, calculated to provoke local wars with their attendant loss of life and destruction of food supplies. The whole problem of liquor in Africa is an immensely complicated one, and its brief dismissal in the Covenant by the blessed word "prohibition" is in the nature of an appeal to the gallery. "The prevention of the establishment of fortifications, or military and naval bases…"
