Major HANNS VISCHER: Just after I had crossed the Sahara, some years ago, I had the great pleasure to meet Colonel Tilho in Nigeria; and last time we met—I think in 1909—to celebrate our homecoming in Paris, we spoke of the work in Africa of our two respective countries. During my journey, and whenever I met the French in those regions, I was particularly impressed by the difficulties and privations these officers suffered so cheerfully. In Nigeria we had our railway, and we got frequent leave. As I remembered those isolated posts in the heart of the Sahara, while looking at the pictures we saw to-night, separated by hundreds of miles, rarely getting a mail or any provisions from the coast during those long years of war, when few boats went to the West Coast of Africa, I was filled with admiration for the work done by Colonel Tilho and his comrades. In the course of his lecture the Colonel showed clearly how necessary it is for us to co-operate in Africa, not only for the welfare of the native people but also for the very existence of our respective colonies. He has shown to us to-night how well we can complement each other. When that German-Turkish column advanced south across the desert, at a moment when we had sent most of our troops from Nigeria to East Africa, it would have been a hard thing for the people in our colony if the officers under Colonel Tilho’s orders, assisted by some native troops sent north from Nigeria, had not been able to arrest the enemy’s progress. The PRESIDENT: I know you will all want me to congratulate Colonel Tilho on your behalf on the lucid, graceful, and humorous lecture he has given us this evening. There has been great talk about the co-operation between us and the French, and I think we might go a little deeper even than that. When we can get a French officer like Colonel Tilho over here in the flesh, and can hear from his own lips what he has done, when he shows us pictures of the kind of country he has had to make his way through, the kind of people he has had to make friends with: when we see all that, certainly we who have had to do similar work in other parts of the world—and probably you at home, even though you have not had that great pleasure and honour, must have a very deep fellow-feeling with him and his compatriots—we feel that there is something deep and common between us when we realize so vividly the work that they are doing, the difficulties that they have had to encounter, and the great work of civilization and humanization which they are carrying on in these far remote recesses of Central Africa. We have had to do the same things ourselves in other parts of the world. We see the results of our own efforts, and Colonel Tilho this evening has shown us what the French have done in opening out the great arid wastes of the Sahara desert and the French Sudan. What they have done and what we have done is good for the world as a whole. It has all been opened out gradually in the course