The German official carries this operation through with the least amount of sentiment. I asked a planter in the Cameroons whether he obtained all the labour he wanted with a fair amount of ease. He looked at me in astonishment, and replied, “With ease, of course. I only notify the Government that I want labour and they bring it to me!” On another occasion, when I was discussing Portuguese administration with a French cotton planter from the Cunene, he began roundly abusing the Portuguese Government, and upon my inquiring wherein they differed from the German administration across the river, he replied, “The Germans stand no nonsense over labour. If the native villages are small and distant from the planters, they just burn down the villages and drive the natives nearer the planters. The Government can then quite easily make a list of the able-bodied men and supply them as they are required.” How far this may be a general characteristic of German treatment of native races, I cannot say, but what I have seen of German colonial methods does not impress me that their occupation is far removed from a sort of military despotism. In the matter of official recruitment of labour, the Germans are by far the most vigorous of any of the West African Powers. In this official recruitment the individual labourer concerned has very little say indeed; that he should desire to enjoy his freedom is apparently no concern of anyone, all he knows is that he has to work for the white man for a given period, and in German South West Africa the “contract” must be made “as long as possible.” [Sidenote: DOMESTIC SLAVERY] The hardships of contract labour are greatly increased by the prevalence of domestic slavery. We are sometimes told that domestic slavery is inseparable from native social life, and that from time immemorial it has been an integral part of African law and custom. For that matter so has cannibalism! There are many apologists for domestic slavery, including students of such eminence as Mr. R. E. Dennett and the Editor of the _African Mail_; the latter considers it would be foolish to abolish the House Rule Ordinance—or in other words the legalization of domestic slavery in Southern Nigeria. It is difficult to understand how a man with Mr. Dennett’s experience could possibly write the paper on this question which was reprinted in a journal of the Royal Colonial Institute. Mr. Dennett knows, or should know, that the horrors of early history in the middle Congo, the blood-curdling stories of Kumasi, the present-day slavery of the Portuguese colonies and a thousand other labour scandals rested and still rest in the ultimate resort upon domestic slavery. The cheap sneers at the sentimentalist, the innuendo that they are mere stay-at-home critics is entirely misplaced and no one knows this better than Mr. R. E. Dennett.