Still less do I make any reflection upon the educated West African as such. Among these Westernized Natives are men to be regarded with the utmost respect, for they have achieved the well-nigh insuperable. They have succeeded, despite all, in remaining African in heart and sentiment; and in retaining their dignity in the midst of difficulties which only the most sympathetic alien mind can appreciate, and, even so, not wholly. To Mary Kingsley alone, perhaps, was it given to probe right down to the painful complexities of their position as only a woman, and a gifted woman, specially endowed, could do. Of such men the great Fanti lawyer, John Mensah Sarbah, whose recent and premature death is a calamity for West Africa, was one of the best types. The venerable Dr. E. Wilmot Blyden, whose race will regard him some day as its misunderstood prophet, is another. One could name others. Perchance their numbers are greater than is usually supposed, and are not confined to men of social distinction and learning. And these men wring their hands. They see, and they feel, the pernicious results of a well-meaning but mistaken policy. They appreciate the depth of the abyss. But they lack the power of combination, and their position is delicate to a degree which Europeans, who do not realize the innumerable undercurrents and intrigues of denationalized West African society are unable to grasp. Between these two schools of thought, the “damned nigger” school and the denationalizing school (that, without appreciating it, plays into the hands of the first), which threaten the West African in his freedom, his property and his manhood, there is room for a third. One which, taking note to-day that the West African _is_ a land-owner, desires that he shall continue to be one under British rule, not with decreasing but with increasing security of tenure; taking note that to-day the West African _is_ an agriculturist, a farmer, a herdsman, and, above all, to the marrow of his bones, a trader, declines to admit that he should be degraded, whether by direct or indirect means, to the position of a hireling; taking note that customary law it is which holds native society together, calls for its increased study and demands that time shall be allowed for its gradual improvement from within, deprecating its supersession by European _formulæ_ of law in the name of “reform,” for which the country is not ripe and whose application can only dislocate, not raise, West African social life. A school of thought which, while prepared to fight with every available weapon against attempts to impose conditions of helotism upon the West African, earnestly pleads that those controlling the various influences moulding his destinies from without, shall be inspired to direct their energies towards making him a better African, not a hybrid. A school of thought which sees in the preservation of the West African’s land for him and his descendants; in a system