Carriers too are demanded in numbers and for distances which violate every native restriction. It is but two years ago that a British official in Southern Nigeria decided to start off upon a journey on Sunday morning, and because the carriers did not come quickly enough, he marched into the two nearest churches and seized the congregations, including the native minister, and to demonstrate further his petty authority and repugnance of loftier ideals, insisted on this native clergyman carrying a box containing his whisky. At this distance it is the ludicrous which probably strikes the imagination, but it is an entirely different matter locally. The missionaries of Southern Nigeria, no matter what their denomination, are of a very devout and noble-minded order; they have instilled into the minds of the natives a deep reverence of all things pertaining to worship, and nothing will ever efface from the native mind that—to say the least—irreverent conduct of the representative of the Christian Government of Great Britain. It is difficult sometimes to discriminate between contract labour, forced labour and slavery, the boundary lines having been obliterated by vigorous administrations demanding labour for this and that work of public utility, which in reality bear little relation to an enterprise for the general welfare. In Belgian Congo this is carried further than in any other West African colony. The Belgians insist that there is no forced labour in the Congo, and this is perfectly true from the legal point of view, but nevertheless almost the whole administrative machinery and Government undertakings are maintained by forced labour. To roads and bridges Belgium has added telegraphs, mines, plantations, and recruitment for the army; the ranks of both—labourers and soldiers—being filled almost entirely by forced labour. [Sidenote: BELGIAN FORCED LABOUR] Loud were the complaints made to us in our recent journeys through the Congo of the incessant demands for labour by the Administration. Wearied with a day of struggle through Congo forests and swamp, I was resting one moonlight evening in the centre of a primitive Congo village; a group of native chiefs were sitting round me discussing political conditions. The absence of a certain token led me to question one individual somewhat pointedly as to the cause. “If I tell you, white man, you won’t betray me?” “Your chief knows me well enough for that,” I replied.