under the Crown, concerned with administration only, and leaving commerce to the merchants. The abandoned forts were to be reoccupied, and more built (to control the native chiefs and the export of slaves, but not for territorial extension). An increase of the troops and a line of blockhouses were also recommended. This, it will be remembered, was a period of some activity against the slave trade to America, and between 1848 and 1858 three more Committees followed. The first recommended less forcible methods, the second that the means of suppression should be reinforced, and the third that the operations should be directed rather against the demand than the supply.
Yet another twenty years passed, and in 1865 we obtain from the proceedings of the Committee to which I have referred a vivid glimpse of the condition of West Africa at that time, and of contemporary opinion in England. Lagos, meantime (in 1861), had been added to the settlements, owing to the intervention of a naval officer in a native question of succession, and was made a consulate. Each of the settlements had increased its territory, in spite of the orders from England, and we can hardly wonder at this when we find that the bullets from opposing native combatants pattered on the barracks of the native soldiers at the Gambia, while on the Gold Coast the first attempt at a liquor license was opposed by the natives, because its effect was felt two miles inland, where the British had no jurisdiction. The evidence of Colonel Ord, R.E., Governor of Bermuda, who was sent by the Government to make a special examination and report on the West African Settlements, went to show that all that was claimed as under British protection was the actual beach of the sea—where it was not Dutch! My allusion to bullets and liquor licenses will recall to my reader's memory that for over two centuries arms and liquor had been the main articles of exchange with the natives for slaves, and that at the time I am now writing of they had become the staple imports. The small extensions of territory which the Committee complain
