Unfortunately this question of drink has been given a place in the public mind as regards Southern Nigeria altogether disproportionate to the position it does, and should, hold. It has been erected for many sincere, good people into a sort of fetish, obscuring all the deeper issues arising from the impact upon the West African of civilization at a time when civilization has never been so feverishly active, so potent to originate vast changes in a few short years. The temperance reformer in England strikes, often blindly, at “drink” anywhere and everywhere on the same principle, utterly oblivious to physiological and climatic differences; he cannot see beyond or behind the subject which specially interests him and which has become his creed. The use of intoxicants of some kind is common to humanity all over the world. It responds to a need of the human body. Christ Himself did not condemn its use, since He Himself, the Sacred Writings tell us, changed water into wine at a marriage feast. Excessive indulgence in liquor, like indulgence in any other form of human appetite, is a human failing. It is not the drink which is an evil, but the abuse of it. The abuse of liquor nine times out of ten is the outcome of social discomfort and unhappiness, a way of escape, like a narcotic, from the pangs of conscience, or of misery. People who concentrate merely upon effects are unsound guides when constructive measures are required. The temperance reformer in England approaches the question of drink in West Africa from the subjective point of view which characterizes the home outlook upon most questions lying outside the home latitudes. Saturated with his home experience, the English temperance reformer places the West African in the same economic and social setting as the European and argues on parallel lines. To that mode of reasoning, three-fourths of the evils which civilization has inflicted upon coloured races may be traced. Nothing is more curious or more saddening to observe than the unfailing success of such methods of thought translated into public action, in their effect upon home sentiment. Consumption sweeping through the ranks of a coloured people as the consequence of the educationary and religious processes of Europeanism may make a holocaust of human victims. The public remains indifferent. European marriage laws; European ethics, or nominal ethics, in the matter of sex relationship; the European individualistic social system grafted upon the communal life of a coloured people—these things may produce widespread human misery and immorality. The public is cold and unconcerned. European interference and innovation in social customs and usages essential to the well being, to the political and racial needs of a coloured people in one stage of development, but repugnant to European twentieth-century notions, may cause social disturbance and widespread anarchy which those who are responsible for such interference