£165,000—are now of tappable size. Their share in the licence fees paid by European lease-holders engaged in the timber and rubber industry in Bini territory supplies the Bini communities with a further source of income. So greatly do these intelligent people appreciate the efforts of the Administration to enrich their country that when a little while ago they started tapping operations in their rubber plantations under the supervision of the Forestry Officer, the chiefs and villagers insisted that a third share should go to Government, and, despite the Governor’s objections, they would consent to no other arrangement. This has now become embodied in law. The Forestry Department undertakes to dispose of the rubber from the communal plantations, the profits being divided as to one-third for the paramount chiefs, one-third for the village community, and one-third for the Administration. From their increased revenues the chiefs of Benin city, “the city of blood,” as it used to be termed, have already built for themselves a substantial court-house of stone and brick and furnished their capital with a proper water-supply, putting down four miles of piping—thus saving the labour of thousands of persons who had daily to trudge to and from the river—and finding the money for a reservoir, a pumping station, and public hydrants. Such surprising results in the short space of fourteen years are at once a tribute to British rule and to the negro of the Nigerian forests. Many obvious morals suggest themselves. CHAPTER V LAGOS AND ITS PORT—THE FUTURE BOMBAY OF WEST AFRICA Early in the seventies, a decade after the British occupation, Lagos, for more years than one cares to remember an important export centre of the slave trade, was a small settlement inhabited by Yoruba and Bini agriculturists and traders. The Hinterland, threatened by Dahomeyan invasions from the west and Fulani inroads from the north, distressed by internal struggles between various sections of the Yoruba people rebelling against the central authority, was in a state of perpetual ferment. Severed from the mainland, maintaining themselves from hand to mouth, and swept by disease, the few British officials led an unenviable existence. A small three-roomed house protected from the rains by an iron roof harboured the Governor, and the members of his staff were glad to accept the hospitality of European merchants earning a precarious if lucrative livelihood by trading with the natives in palm oil, kernels, ivory, and cotton.