ment, of the Settlements. The Gold Coast was to be given up as soon as the chiefs could stand alone. All taxation, and its correlative of protection to tribes, should be at once abolished, and the settlements carried on temporarily on a grant in aid, 'with a view to ultimate withdrawal from all except, probably, Sierra Leone.' The various settlements should (they said) be again placed under Sierra Leone, as being economical, tending to a uniform policy and to contraction. They regarded the assumption of territory while domestic slavery existed as impossible, assuming that it must be legally prohibited, but practically recognised as being impossible of immediate abolition. Finally, they condemned (most rightly) the employment of attorneys in native causes and trial by jury, and recommended that native chiefs should be the sole judges of their causes, with only a right of appeal to the English. The Chief Justices and Queen's Advocates of these early Settlements, limited to the seabeach, had, it appears, at this date brought overmuch British legal procedure to bear on their dealings with the natives.
Let us once more pass over a period of twenty years. The year 1885 marked the beginning of the 'scramble for Africa,' for which the Berlin Conference of that date laid down the 'rules of the game.' The Dutch Settlements which 'thwarted our trade' on the coast had ceased to exist, and the French had already inaugurated their vast West African Empire with its capital on the Senegal, and its policy of cutting off the British Settlements from access to the interior, and of themselves gaining outlets to the sea at French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, and French Congo. Togoland and the Kameruns had become German the previous year, and a British Protectorate was simultaneously declared over the 'Oil Rivers' (Southern Nigeria). At the Conference itself the British delegates were able to declare that the British flag alone flew on the Middle Niger (Northern Nigeria), and thereby to secure to Great Britain the custodianship of its free navigation. The oversea
