Danfodio's  affairs  have  fallen  into  the  hands  of  England
to  arrange,  and  very  efficiently  her  great  representative  in
West  Africa,  the  Royal  Niger  Company,  has  arranged
them.  But  for  our  Danfodio  and  his  consequences,
France  has  had  twenty,  and  she  has  dealt  with  them
both  gallantly  and  patiently.  But  there  will  always  be,
as  far  as  one  can  see,  trouble  for  France  with  her  tawny
Moors,  now  that  the  sources  of  their  support  are  cut
off  from  them  by  many  of  the  districts  they  once  drew
their  trade  from — the  sea-board  districts  of  the  Benin
Bight,  like  Sierra  Leone,  the  Gold  Coast  and  Lagos,  in
the  English  Niger — being  in  the  hands  of  a  nation  whose
commercial  instincts  enable  it  to  see  the  benefits  of
lower  tariffs  than  France  affects.  Even  were  our  tariffs
to  be  raised  to-morrow,  the  trade  would  again  begin  to
drain  back  into  the  hands  of  its  old  owners,  the  tawny
Moors,  for  the  Western  Soudan  is  being  pacified  by
France.  If  some  way  is  not  devised  of  providing  the
tawny  Moors  with  trade  sufficient  to  keep  them,  things
must  go  badly  there,  owing  to  the  unfertility  of  the
greater  part  of  their  country  and  the  increase  of  the  popu-
lation arising  from  the  pacification  of  the  Western
Soudan,  which  France  is  effecting.  I  will  dwell  no
longer  on  this  sketch  of  the  history  of  the  advance  of
France  in  Western  Africa.  We  in  England  cannot  judge
it  fairly.  Nationally,  her  honour  there  is  our  disgrace  ;
commercially,  her  presence  is  our  ruin.
Two  things  only  stand  out  from  these  generalisations.
