with whom you parted company months before in the far north, travelling on the roads or camping for the night near some local village. The road is at once the club-house and public rendezvous for Nigerian humanity. A vast commingling, a far-reaching fusion unexampled in the history of these peoples is taking place. The expansion of an African religion which, somehow, succeeds in investing the convert with a spiritual and social standing that at once raise him among his fellows, follows as a matter of course. The Mohammedan teacher wanders over the face of the country visiting the centres of human activity, haunting the roads and market-places, unattended, carrying neither purse nor scrip, making no attempt at proselytizing beyond saying his prayers in public, not in a manner to cause obstruction, but quietly in some corner; waiting until people come to him, literally fulfilling the command, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece.” The Mohammedan trader or agriculturist settles in a pagan village, marries pagan women, enters the family and social circle of the community and imparts to it his faith, the women making even readier converts than the men. This is why and this is how Islam is propagating itself and taking root in pagan Nigeria without financial outlay, without doles and collecting boxes. One of the oldest of Christian missionaries in Nigeria, a man of venerable appearance and saintly character, who for twenty-five years has laboured with hands as well as with heart and head for moral and material improvement, not of his converts only, but of their unconverted relatives, confessed to me his fear that nothing could stop Islam from absorbing in course of time the whole of West Africa. He was almost disposed reluctantly to allow that in the providence of God, Islam might prove to be intended as the halfway house through the portals of which it was necessary the West African negro should pass in order to lift him out of a sterilizing paganism and make him a fitter vessel to receive in course of time the nobler ideals of the Christian faith. Sir Harry Johnston is right, I think, when he says that “to Negro Africa,” Islam has come “as a great blessing, raising up savages to a state, at any rate of semi-civilization, making them God-fearing, self-respecting, temperate, courageous, and picturesque.” But Islam does more than this; it preserves racial identity. In West Africa, Christianity destroys racial identity. It should not: as taught it does.