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Well, West Africa's worth to us consists in its being the richest portion of our tropical African Empire. The worth to us of tropical possessions, especially when they are very unhealthy to white men, as West Africa is, is a thing that has frequently been questioned; some eminent men have gravely doubted whether our recent great expansion in West and tropical Central Africa has been wise, while others only reconcile themselves to it because they believe our rule confers a benefit on the native population. But others, whom I humbly follow,

say that tropical raw-material-producing regions are as necessary to us as a great manufacturing nation as wheat-producing regions are to us as a densely populated one, and we have a safer hold both on wheat and tropical raw material when it is grown under our own flag. As you know, one school among the students of the sources of our national wealth holds that the prosperity of England depends on the prosperity of the whole world, more than it does on her own oversea-empire. Of course in a way it does; but what average cautious man would trust the world at large, just because we invest money in it and trade fair with it, to behave well and steadily as a whole for more than a few years at a time, now and then? Not I, at any rate. Mundane affairs are in an imperfect state, and I believe \vill for some time remain so. Therefore I believe mere common sense and caution enforce on us the advisability of having an all-round self-contained empire on which we could fall back for supplies, were any part of the rest of the world to fail us in them. The misery entailed on English homes by the cotton famine in the days of the American Civil War seems almost forgotten, excellent object lesson as it was. Raw cotton possibly will not fail us again, though it is awfully high priced to-day, but we should be inconvenienced in tropical raw material if the States of Central and South America were to neglect business for war-not so deeply inconvenienced as we were in the sixties, because we can now, thanks to our West African, Malayan and Indian possessions, get tropical raw material, for example rubber, from them; but still the inconvenience would be bad enough. Surely then it is better for us to hold such regions ourselves than to rely entirely on foreign States and their possessions. Now West Africa is one of the richest regions for tropical stuff: Be it granted it is unhealthy, and, I may say, you may take it as a general rule that throughout tropical Africa the regions that are the most unhealthy are also the richest. Plateau lands there of mica schist, mountain flanks and deserts, are all very well in their way,