All the coast ports of the Gaboon and Loango had long been frequented by British merchants doing a big trade with Liverpool; and great was the indignation when they found their commerce with the interior cut off by French concessionaires who, it may be, had done nothing to develop the trade of the country. In spirit, of course, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the commercial stipulations of the Berlin and Brussels Acts which followed the Congo Conference of 1884-5. But the French government, in reply to remonstrances, pointed to the monopoly of the Royal Niger Company[131]; and the French courts of law gave decisions adverse to British appellants. It is only fair to quote the justification for this policy of concessions, charters, and other documents conferring special privileges. It is desired—in the interests of the native as well as of the overruling European government—to attract capital to the opening-up and the exploiting of the natural riches of Africa, riches of which the native has remained in utter ignorance for millenniums of years. To invite investments of capital some security must be given that the immediate fruits of the investors’ labours and expenditure will not be unfairly garnered by others who have not run the like risks. No one questions the right of the native, in a varying degree, to a fair proportion of the land; the area being determined by his numbers, degree of civilization, energy, intellectual capacity, and the extent to which he has already developed its resources. It would be, for example, a ridiculous proposition that the 322,450 square miles of German South-West Africa should be the exclusive heritage of a few thousand nomad Hottentot and Bushman hunters, or even of sixty thousand Bantu cattle-keepers; that some Congo forest of ten thousand to thirty thousand square miles should be assigned in perpetuity to a few thousand wandering pygmies prowling over it in search of game and wild bees’ nests; or that the whole of the Sahara with its phosphates and salt-mines be allotted to the raiding Tawareq and Tibu. On the other hand, to say in connection with a well-populated, fairly well-known region like the Niger banks, the Gaboon and Loango coasts, or the lower Ogowé river, that the natives shall only trade with concessionaires or with the Government itself, or that one nation shall be specially favoured in its commerce or trading relations, is to impose a tyranny which the world at large and the subject races will no longer tolerate quietly. It does not follow from this that there is to be no interference with “native” rights, that “freedom should be free to slay herself,” as has often been the case in wild countries, where the unthinking inhabitants destroy the resources of the country without thought for the morrow.