The administrative problems which confront the Government of Southern Nigeria in the western, or Yoruba, province are very much more complicated than any to be met with in the central and eastern provinces. They arise partly from the character, at once progressive and unstable, of the Yorubas themselves, partly from the curious divergence in the political relations subsisting between his Majesty’s Government and the various sections of the old Yoruba confederation, partly from the influences working in favour of direct British rule which find favour in the Lagos Legislative Council, but mainly through neglect, disinclination to look a situation not without delicacy in the face, and the absence of any serious effort to map out a definite, consistent policy. In one respect at least, that of the rapid assimilation of every feature, good, bad, and indifferent, which comes to them from the West with the influx of European religious and social ideas, law, and commercial and industrial activity, the Yorubas (who considerably outnumber them) may be termed the Baganda of West Africa. If this capacity spells true progress for a tropical African people, then the Yorubas are infinitely more progressive than any of the peoples, not of Nigeria merely, but of Western Africa. It is, nevertheless, worthy of remark that, without exception, all the native papers published in Lagos which, if not in every case edited by Yorubas, profess in every case to be the mouthpieces of the “Yoruba nation,” ceaselessly lament the Europeanizing of the country, the decay of the national spirit, the decadence of family authority, and the deterioration of the rising generation without, however—so far as many years’ perusal of their columns can enable one to judge—ever making an attempt to grapple with the problem in a constructive sense, and, in some cases, perhaps unwittingly, contributing not a little to further the processes which they denounce and deplore. In this, their notable characteristic, the Yorubas may have been influenced by environment, for although a considerable portion of the area they inhabit is forest land, much of it is open park-like country, and the whole of it lies outside the deltaic region altogether. It is among the Yorubas that Christian missionary propaganda has obtained most of its converts in West Africa, although none of the ruling chiefs have accepted the Christian faith, and although Islam is now making much more headway than Christianity. Moreover, official Christianity, already represented in Yoruba by as many sects as we have at home, has been riven by the defection of a body, some 3000 strong, I believe, which has constituted itself an independent Church, the real, though not explicitly avowed, motive being a refusal to abide by the monogamous sexual relationship which the Church enforces. With Christian missionary teaching Western education, or, more accurately, and, generally, semi-education (and