Another factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe is the demoralization of domestic life incident to methods of trade. The Mpongwe man is a trader by instinct. In shrewdness and diplomacy I doubt whether he has a superior among all the tribes of West Africa. This shrewdness he expresses in many homely proverbs; as, for example, when he says: “If you must sleep three in a bed, sleep in the middle.” White traders all along the coast employ the Mpongwe as middlemen between them and the interior people, who possess the export products. The white man gives the middleman a certain quantity of goods on trust. With these he goes to the interior and establishes a small trading-post in one or several towns. It is a life of privation and danger, a lonely, miserable existence, but he endures it with patience for the joyful hope that at the end of a year or two he may return to his beloved town and family in Gaboon, so rich that he can afford to “rip” for six months; to dress so that the women will adore him and the men hate him. His goods being soon exhausted by his numerous relations as well as himself, he starts off for another year or two. He has a wife, or wives, at Gaboon, and he takes to himself a wife or two at each of his interior trading-centres. In the dangers of these middlemen and the necessities of trade Miss Mary H. Kingsley finds a plausible argument for polygamy, amounting, in Miss Kingsley’s opinion, to a full justification. Indeed, for various reasons, the majority of traders defend and advocate native polygamy. The journeys of these native traders to the interior are dangerous, and I agree with Miss Kingsley that they deserve credit for their courage. “Certainly they run less risk of death from fever than a white man would; but, on the other hand, their colour gives them no protection; and their chance of getting murdered is distinctly greater; the white governmental powers cannot revenge their death in the way they would the death of a white man, for these murders usually take place away in some forest region, in a district no white man has ever penetrated.” There are two reasons why so many of them nevertheless survive. The first is that trade follows definite routes and the trader is expected about once in six months by all the towns along the way, in which the people are eager for trade-goods, the men “fairly wild for tobacco” and the women impatient for beads and other ornaments. Under these circumstances, for the people of any one town to kill the trader would mean trouble between that town and the other towns along the route.