Take, for example, the land question. If there is one thing upon which all the most experienced Nigerian administrators are agreed it is the absolute essentiality, for the future of the people of the country, that their use and enjoyment of the land should be secured, not only against a certain type of European capitalist who covets this rich soil for his own schemes, and, under the pretence of industrial expansion, would cheerfully turn the native agriculturist, farmer, and trader into a “labourer,” but against the class of native who, for his own ends, for speculative purposes mainly, seeks to undermine native law and to change the right of user upon which native land tenure is based, into that of owner at the expense of the community at large. More especially does this become a question of vital importance to native communities where, as in Yorubaland, you have a comparatively dense population which under the _pax Britannica_ is bound to increase at a very rapid rate, and thus requires every inch of land for its own future uses. But as matters stand at present, we cannot, in the Egba district, which, being nearer to Lagos, is more accessible to certain undesirable influences, both European and native, and to the infiltration of European laws and customs regulating the tenure of land, take effective measures to counteract these influences. We could, of course, if we chose, not in the Egba district only, but throughout Yorubaland. But there has been a lamentable reluctance both at home and in the Protectorate to foresee and cope with a predicament which all realize, which some from a natural bent of mind inclining them to favour the substitution everywhere of direct for indirect rule, and others who are of the same way of thinking but from motives of self-interest may secretly rejoice at, but which the officials whose hearts are really in the country and who have sufficient experience to understand the endless and disastrous embarrassments that the disintegration of native law relating to land would produce, deeply deplore. What has been the result? The Egbas are beginning to buy and to sell land among themselves in absolute violation of their own customs and laws, thereby laying up for their country a heritage of trouble and inserting the thin edge of the wedge of their own undoing by letting in the land monopolist and speculator. This, according to all its professions and to its actions in some specific circumstances, for which it is to be warmly commended, is, in the view of the Administration, inimical to the public interest of the Protectorate. What is springing up in Abeokuta to-day will spread to the other districts to-morrow—nay, is doing so.