"There are three obstacles to the white race from Europe overrunning and colonising the continent of Africa as it has overrun and colonised the two Americas and Australasia. The first is the insalubrity of the well-watered regions and the uninhabitability of the desert tracts; the second is the opposition of strong indigenous races; and the third, of quite recent growth, is a growing sentiment which is increasingly influencing public opinion, in Europe more especially, and which forbids the white man to do evil that good may come: namely, to displace by force of arms pre-existing races in order that, the white man may take the land they occupy for his own use. It is probable that the second and third reasons combined may in future prove the more effective checks. Deserts, to be made habitable and cultivable, only need irrigation, and apparently there is a subterranean water supply underlying most African deserts which can be tapped by artesian wells. The extreme unhealthiness of the well-watered parts of Africa is due not so much to climate as to the presence of malaria in the systems of the Negro inhabitants. This malaria is conveyed from the black man to the white man by certain gnats of the genus _Anopheles_—possibly by other agencies. But the draining of marshes and the sterilisation of pools, together with other measures, may gradually bring about the extinction of the mosquito; while, on the other hand, it seems as though the drug (_Cassia Beareana_) obtained from the roots of a cassia bush may act as a complete cure for malarial fever. … "For practical purposes the only areas south of the Sahara Desert which at the present time are favourable to white colonisation are the following. In West Africa there can be no white colonisation under existing conditions; the white man can only remain there for a portion of his working life as an educator and administrator. … In North-East Africa, Abyssinia and Eritrea will suggest themselves as white man’s countries—presenting, that is to say, some of the conditions favourable to European colonisation. The actual coast of Eritrea is extremely hot, almost the hottest country in the world, but it is not necessarily very unhealthy. The heat, however, apart from the existence of a fairly abundant native population, almost precludes the idea of a European settlement. But on the mountains of the hinterland which are still within Italian territory there are said to be a few small areas suited at any rate to settlement by Italians, who, by-the-by, seem to be getting on very well with the natives in that part of Africa. But a European colonisation of Abyssinia, possible as it might be climatically, is out of the question in view of the relatively abundant and warlike population indigenous to the Ethiopian Empire. … {4}