I trust that these few points are sufficient to indicate the difficulties that lie before the student of native character. Yet in spite of this, there exists a certain section of the community at home who presume to dictate the methods to be adopted in dealing with natives. Strong in their magnificent ignorance of the local requirements, racial characteristics, and the factors that make society, men are found who will condemn such acts as the desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb. These individuals, unless specialists, would never dream of discoursing on the treatment of horses, spectral analysis, or any other subject requiring special study, yet, with a confidence sublime in its assurance, they will launch forth into the still more abstruse subject of native administration. Nothing is more to be deprecated than this meddling on the part of the stay-at-homes, in the methods adopted by the men specially selected to undertake the difficult task of ruling these peoples. We select the men whom we think most capable of promoting the prosperity of the countries in question, and instead of allowing them to find out by experience the methods most productive of good, we cramp their efforts by well-intentioned but fatal limitations on points of which we are necessarily profoundly ignorant. If, as a section of the press would lead us to believe, we are compelled to assume that every man who leaves this country _ipso facto_ becomes an abandoned ruffian, the sooner we shut up our branch shops, and retain our servants under the watchful eye of the man in blue, the better for all concerned. But if, on the other hand, we are confident that we are promoting the welfare of the community at large by assuming these responsibilities, and believe that we can find reliable men to carry on the work, the least that we can do is to allow those men to profit by and regulate their methods on the experience that they must necessarily acquire, and which is necessarily denied to us. The fact that the method most productive of good in Africa is not the same as the method most productive of good at home is no evidence of the inadvisability of its adoption. A thousand and one factors known only to the man on the spot must be assumed. In the halcyon days that are no doubt coming, no one will be allowed to hold an important position in the Government who has not gone through the mill of travel. "What do they know of England who only England know?" What indeed! In an empire like ours, of which the British isles are already but the viscera, it is inconceivable that men who are largely responsible for the administration of that empire should display the gaping ignorance of the elements of which it is composed, which daily passes without comment. This external interference is of paramount importance. It is crushing all our African ventures, and with the rapidly-increasing facility of communication attendant on telegraphic construction, its effect is becoming daily more