Such were my reflections as I read the extremely interesting
address- of Sir Hugh Clifford, the Governor of Nigeria, to his Legislative Council delivered at Lagos early in February. Perhaps in the year of the Wembley Exhibition the British public will learn to take a greater interest in the progress of their tropical dependencies across the seas. Their knowledge of what has been achieved in the last twenty years in Nigeria is, to say the least of it, rudimentary. Here is a territory as large as Germany, Holland, Belgium and two-thirds of France with a population of 18,000,000 in every state of civiliza- tion " from that of cultured Muslims to that represented by cannibals, head-hunters and the ritualistic sacrificers of human beings." This great country is being adminis- tered by a political staff, the ratio of whose duty strength is about one white man to every 90,000 natives. In this great territory, half of it dense forest and the rest wind-swept desert, in parts of which, as Sir Hugh Clifford tells us, " human meat was sold openly in the market in quite recent times," the complicated machinery of modern civilized government has been put into operation.
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