The problem of governing these peoples offers no complications, which may be called political, of a serious character. It is rendered easier in the Central Province, where the authority of the Benin Kingdom, exercised for so many centuries, has led to the centralization of a strong native authority; and proportionately less so in the Eastern Province, where no considerable native power was ever evolved. The Administration levies no direct tax, and its chief concern is to keep the peace, to open up the country, and to check barbarous customs. Astonishing progress has been effected in these respects during the past decade, nor must it be supposed that because there is an absence of complex political questions, progress has not been attended with complexities of a different order. Indeed, people at home can have no conception of the natural difficulties under which the administrator, the merchant, and, for that matter, the native also, labour in carrying out their respective tasks and avocations in the deltaic and forest regions of Nigeria. For six months in the year a very large portion of the Central and Eastern Provinces is partially submerged. The Niger overflows its banks, every forest rivulet becomes a river, the creeks and channels spread their waters upon the land, the forest is flooded over an enormous area, and the pathways intersecting it are impassable. It is in circumstances such as these that District Commissioners have to keep in touch with their districts, not infrequently spending days and even nights in dug-outs under conditions which may be better imagined than described; marching in the rear of weary carriers through reeking, soaking, steaming forest; negotiating streams swollen into torrents; camping where and when they can, the boots they remove getting mouldy in a night, the clothes they hang up wringing wet when they come to put them on again; add to this a body often plagued with malaria and rheumatism, poorly nourished with sometimes insufficient and usually untempting diet, tormented by stinging insects, and a faint idea can be formed of conditions, during the rainy season, of a life which even in the dry season calls upon the utmost reserves of a man’s moral fibre, to say nothing of his physical powers. That the latter give way does not, alas! need demonstration, for while a favoured few resist, the roll of deaths and invaliding tells its own tale; and it would not be surprising if the former proved itself frequently unequal to the strain. Such cases are, however, extremely rare, and it is but natural if men labouring for their country under the conditions of hardship I have inadequately sketched should bitterly resent being portrayed on public platforms at home in the light of rivets in an administrative machine cynically demoralizing the natives of the country with drink in order to raise revenue.[6] Assuredly it is necessary, as a prominent statesman addressing the House of Commons