the world; but, as Sir William Maxwell said, "I am convinced that, from causes wholly unpreventable, West Africa is and must remain a place with certain peculiar dangers of its own"[1]; therefore it requires most careful, expert handling. It is no use your trying to get its riches out by a set of hasty amateur experiments; it is no use just dumping down capital on it and calling these goings on "Developing the resources," or "Raising the African in the plane of civilisation;" because these goings on are not these things, they are but sacrifices on the altars of folly and idleness.
Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance.
Sir William Maxwell, when he referred to "causes wholly unpreventable," was referring mainly to the unhealthiness of West Africa. There seems no escape from this great drawback. Every other difficulty connected with it one can imagine removable by human activity and ingenuity even the labour difficulty—but, I fear, not so the fever. Although this is not a thing to discourage England from holding West Africa, it is a thing which calls for greater forethought in the administration of it than she need give to a healthy region. In a healthy region it does not matter so much whether there is an excess over requirements in the number of men employed to administer it, but in one with a death rate of at least 35 per cent. of white men it does matter.
- ↑ Forty-eighth annual report Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, 1898.
