declared some years ago, that “the more you extend your Empire the more imperative it is that this House should extract from its agents abroad the same standard of conduct which we exact at home.” But it is also necessary that public opinion in Britain should take more trouble than it does to realize something of the conditions under which its agents in the most unhealthy tropical regions of the Empire have to spend their lives, and should extend to them more sympathy than, at present, it seems often inclined to do. [Illustration: ONE OF THE COMMUNAL RUBBER PLANTATIONS (FUNTUMIA ELASTICA), BENIN CITY.] [Illustration: A SCENE IN YORUBALAND.] It is in this part of Nigeria, where natural man is perpetually in conflict with his environment, that you would expect to find those darker customs and practices connected with the spiritual side of life, whereby humanity has in all ages sought to propitiate the forces of Nature; customs which under the modern form of sword-dances, Morris dances, and the like attest to their former existence in Europe. If we are honest with ourselves we must admit that the inspiration which has evolved a sort of misty horror around the peoples of the West Coast of Africa, has been largely drawn from the setting of swamp and forest where the sacrificial rites associated with them, more prominently, perhaps, than they deserve, have been performed. In themselves these rites differ in no way from those we are familiar with in the records of white peoples when they had reached a stage of intellectual advancement which the Nigerian negro has certainly never attained, and which it is doubtful if any human stock could, or can ever, attain, in such an environment. Owing to the unconquered and, I think, unconquerable natural forces surrounding him, the Nigerian of the delta is still in the stage “to listen to the will of Jove which comes forth from the lofty and verdant oak”; to seek as the load-star of his spiritual necessities and in his ceaseless struggle against implacable odds, the conciliation of the fertilizing spirit through whose assistance alone he can hope to subject them; to incorporate the personality of protecting deities into man by oblation and by human or animal sacrifice, the shedding of blood being the mystic symbol of established contact with the protecting spiritual elements (the same prompting animates the most sacred of Christian rites) as it remains the tangible and most potent symbol of human brotherhood. The sacrificial knife of the Nigerian negro may seem more repulsive to the modern eye from the setting of black forms framed in the deep shadows of primeval forest and fœtid swamp, and a double dose of original sin may with complacency be assigned to him by the superficial. But in itself and in the motive which raises it quivering over the bound and helpless victim, it differentiates not at all from the story of Abraham and Isaac handed down to us in the sacred writings and not, certainly,