Briefly stated, the Forestry Department is designed to conserve forest resources for the benefit of the State—the State meaning, in practice, the native communities owning the land and their descendants, and the Administration charged with their guardianship, and while encouraging any legitimate private enterprise, whether European or native, to oppose the wholesale exploitation of those resources for the benefit of individuals, white or black. It aims at impressing the native with the economic value of his forests as a source of present and continual revenue for himself and his children; at inducing native communities to give the force of native law to its regulations and by their assistance in applying them, to prevent destruction through indiscriminate farming operations and bush fires, to prevent the felling of immature trees, to replant and to start communal plantations. It aims at the setting aside, with the consent of the native owners, of Government reserves and native reserves, and at furthering industrial development by private enterprise under conditions which shall not interfere with the general welfare of the country. In a word, the Forestry Department seeks to associate the native communities with the expanding values of the land in which they dwell, so that for them the future will mean increasing prosperity and wealth, the essence of the policy being that these communities are not only by law and equity entitled to such treatment, but that any other would be unworthy of British traditions. It is what some persons call maudlin sentiment, the sort of “maudlin sentiment” which stands in the way of the Nigerian native being expropriated and reduced to the position of a hired labourer on the properties of _concessionnaires_ under whose patriotic activities the Nigerian forest would be exploited until it had disappeared from the face of the earth like the forests of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Eastern Canada.