[Sidenote: FIXED LAND BOUNDARIES] The native boundaries are almost invisible to the European eye, but to the African student of nature those boundaries are fixed and immovable as the eternal hills. The limits of tribal lands, within the orbit of which the clans may move and hunt whenever they will, are the stream, the palm plantation, the hilly range and the bridges across streams and rivers. Upon the chief and his advisers devolves the sacred duty of maintaining intact these tribal lands, alienation being foreign to the native ideas. So jealously is this guarded that many paramount chiefs in native law have no power to grant even occupancy rights. For six months the cession of Lagos to the British Crown was held up because King Docemo had signed a treaty which appeared to violate this principle of native law. The population declared that the ownership of the land of Lagos was not vested in the paramount chief, but in the seven White Cap chiefs, who, fearing the terrible consequences of alienating the tribal lands, fled to the bush. It became necessary for the British representatives to give the most explicit assurances and sacred promises on the point, in order to secure the ratification of the treaty of cession. It is perfectly true that titles have been granted to native tribes and to white men, but it is equally true that originally there was never the remotest idea that this involved the European conception of total alienation. In the Holt _v._ Rex case of Southern Nigeria, the Crown held that “under native law strangers cannot obtain freehold rights—only occupancy rights.” The tribal conception of occupancy rights also carries with it the communal idea; a native clan settling by permission within the territory of another tribe really constitutes the first step in progressive incorporation. In the first instance of white settlers, there are abundant stories of the native interpretation of this principle—some of them distinctly objectionable, although there were pure motives behind them; others are amusing, such as that of the chiefs “borrowing” saws, axes, string, rope, nails and what not. Again and again they have freely and openly helped themselves to palm nuts and other produce from the white man’s ground. No doubt much of what the European calls “pilfering” was really quite innocently founded upon the communal conception of the primitive races.