ABSTRACT
A subject of such vast and vital import as this in its bearing to our West African Empire is bound to prove of the deepest and most essential interest to all our readers. Yet there is a fascination about these pages which is only explicable to the philosopher who is interested in the psychological study of human motives. Regarding this vast mass of correspondence solely from the estimate of time (the accumulation of six years), and its aggregate in words, amounting as this does to over 150,000, it is, indeed, a stupendous monument of official labour and methods – those laborious and roundabout methods that the sympathetically observant Dickens belaboured under the designation of ‘circumlocution’ – in popular parlance, the ‘red tape and sealing wax of official routine.’ But human nature, as thinkers of old have pointed out, is fearfully and wonderfully constructed: it is so intricately variable in fact, as to defy analysis.
