Everything is against Christianity as presented to the Nigerian (I venture to emphasize this), and everything is in favour of Islam, although Christianity, in itself, contains more that should appeal to the Negro character than does Mohammedanism. The conditions of Southern Nigeria are the conditions of the Old Testament. The crying need of the country, as of all western tropical Africa, is the need which is proclaimed in, and stamps itself upon, every page of the book of Genesis, the Divinely ordained requirement—population. Vice plays only a microscopic part in the relationship of sex in Nigeria. Race propagation is the motive force which regulates sexual relationship. The Nigerian, incessantly striving with the destructive agencies of Nature, responds to the instinctive and mysterious call of racial necessity. Infant mortality is terrible. With the Nigerian the reproduction of the species is the paramount, if unanalyzed and, no doubt, uncomprehended obsession. It must continue to be so for a period whose limit will be determined by the rate of his progression in coping with these destructive agencies. This is not the place to discuss what the attitude of the Christian missionary should be to this paramount racial need, but it is obvious that his insistence upon an acceptance of a sex relationship contrary to the promptings of Nature must present a barrier—one of the greatest, if not the greatest—to the acceptance of the Christian faith, or, perhaps, it would be better to say, of orthodox Christianity. One might be permitted, perhaps, to suggest that those who are disposed to regard the condition of the Nigerian forest-dweller in these matters as calling for hard and rigid regulation, are too prone to forget what Lecky describes as the “appalling amount of moral evil, festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of a decorous society,” in civilized Europe, monogamistic social laws notwithstanding. Sex relationship, whatever its character and whatever the conditions of society or climate, is never, and can never be, free from abuses. West African polygamy contains many ugly sores, and so does the European system.