Government has done little or nothing to cope with these natural difficulties. The Admiralty charts available to the captains of steamers are ludicrously obsolete, and all wrong. No continuous series of observations have been taken of the river, and no effort made to tackle the problem of improving navigation. Four years ago, by Sir Percy Girouard’s directions, soundings were, indeed, taken over a distance of 350 miles from Burutu (Forcados) to Lokoja at the junction with the Benue; with the result that only seven miles of sand-bars were reported to require dredging in order to secure a six-foot channel all the year round. The experienced merchant smiled. He is a slightly cynical person, is the West African merchant who knows his Niger. Anyhow he is still whistling for his six-foot channel. One dredger, the best which money could buy, was purchased by the Northern Nigerian Administration. It did a little dredging round about Lokoja (and the merchants in the south declare that the performance has made matters worse for them), has been used as a passenger boat up the Benue, and is now, I believe, filling up the swamps at Baro; but the six-foot channel still exists as an attractive theory in the Government Blue Book. There is so much to praise, administratively speaking, in Nigeria that one feels the freer to speak bluntly of the failure of Government to handle this matter of Niger navigation. It is one of the inevitable, one of the many deplorable, results of dual control over a common territory; one of the consequences of the long competition between the two rival Administrations, each quite honestly playing for its own hand and each quite satisfied that it alone can think imperially. The upshot has been pernicious to the public interest. The river-service is shocking from the point of view of efficiency, and enormously costly. The steamers themselves are falling to pieces. There is no system of public pilotage, or of lighting. Trading steamers must anchor at night, which involves, in the aggregate, a great waste of time and money. The two Administrations are so busy squabbling over their competing railways and manœuvring to frame rates which will cut one another out, that the great natural highway into the interior is utterly neglected.