It will be objected that these suggestions do not take into account the present military expenditure of the Protectorates and are dumb with regard to the Imperial grant to Northern Nigeria. I have left a consideration of these two questions until now because they can, I think, be taken together. The military establishment of Southern Nigeria costs £100,000 per annum. That of Northern Nigeria costs £160,000 per annum. Neither is excessive in itself, although in the latter case it amounts to no less than 33 per cent. of the total expenditure of the Protectorate! It is not one penny too much, and to reduce the number of troops would be folly, having regard to the immensity of the country and the kind of political problem facing us. And yet could anything be more topsy-turvey? Here is a financially struggling Protectorate urgently in need of the most vital necessities; incapable even of building decent houses for its over-worked and short-handed staff; forced to deprive the latter of even their travelling allowances, and to sacrifice considerations of reasonable comfort and, therefore, of health for its _personnel_; in a position to pay so little for posts of enormous responsibility that the entire political expenditure is only some £70,000 per annum; able to devote but a miserable £1300 a year upon economic forestry, but saddled with this incubus of £160,000 upon a military establishment which has already been called upon (in the case of the last Ashanti war) to provide contingents for service outside the Protectorate, which would infallibly happen again, in the by no means remote contingencies of a further outbreak in Ashanti or disturbances in the Sierra Leone hinterland. This situation needs to be examined in conjunction with the Imperial grant about which so much fuss is made.