No, you cannot excite public interest in these matters. But mention the liquor trade, describe the Nigerian as an infant in brain, incapable of self-control, down whose throat wicked merchants are forcibly pouring body and soul destroying drink which a wicked Administration taxes in order to raise revenue. Public sentiment responds with alacrity. It becomes at once a popular cry, and the most inconceivable distortions of native character and native life pass muster. Oppose that view and it will be a miracle if you emerge with any shred of reputation you may once have possessed. Stones from episcopal catapults will whistle round your ears. Scribes, utterly ignorant of the country whose inhabitants they portray in an absurdly false light, and who make their living by going shuddering around in professional temperance circles, will hint darkly that somewhere in the dim back of beyond your attitude is dictated by personal interest. A certain type of missionary will denounce you from the housetops, ransack the Bible for quotations to describe the extent of your fall from grace, and end up by praying the Almighty for the salvation of your soul. You will be described as a man who cynically ministers to the degradation of the negro. People who believed in you will ponder sadly over your moral declension. You may consider yourself lucky if your best friend does not cut you in the street. To disparage the Administration, to describe the English gentlemen who serve it in Nigeria as callous onlookers while a people sinks down before them in ruin and decay; to paint the sober Nigerian as a drunken brute—all this is permissible. But the deafening clamour which arises, the protesting and outraged indignation which obtains if a humble voice is heard to deny the accuracy, and to resent, in the public interest, these sweeping charges against White and Black alike, beggars description. You find yourself denounced to the whole world as a cruel libeller of godly men, and much else besides. It would be humorous if it were not pathetic, because amidst all this froth and fury the vital problems arising out of European contact with West Africa are obscured, and a force which, instructed and directed in the right way, might be of untold benefit is wasted on a sterile issue.