With the establishment of the European government this trade method is sooner or later reversed. The white trader sends native sub-traders into the interior to buy produce as directly as possible from the original owners. This cuts off the people of the intermediate stages from what they regard as their exclusive right of participation as middlemen. The dissatisfaction usually grows until it ends in war. Germany in her various colonies is frequently engaged in this one-sided war; and she wages it ruthlessly. Meantime the Fang of the lower Gaboon and some other tribes similarly situated have found far better employment. The Fang raise food—cassava and plantains—for the market at Libreville. For there are usually about seventy-five white men in Gaboon, all of whom eat plantains; and there are throngs of natives, servants of the white men, and others employed by the government. Besides, the Mpongwe women, except the Christians, are mostly unwilling to care for gardens and they must buy food for themselves and their families. The Fang therefore can easily sell all the food they can raise. In the morning looking from the mission-house one may see the bay covered with white sails like a flock of sea-gulls—the sails of the Fang canoes bringing food to the market. This is surely the best fortune that can fall to any people in West Africa. While it still gives opportunity for their trade instinct, it turns them to agriculture, the most wholesome of all occupations for such a people. It keeps them at home, provides healthful work, extends opportunity to all and distributes prosperity. [Illustration: FANG TRADERS WITH IVORY. ] The white man in setting out for Africa divests himself of every superfluous possession and provides only for the bare necessities of life. If he is bound for the interior he must feel that he has consecrated himself to poverty. It is strange, therefore, and surprising to find the natives regarding his meagre stock of goods as fabulous wealth and himself as a sort of multi-millionaire. But it is stranger still that he himself should gradually accept their judgment and regard himself as rich. For the sense of wealth depends upon having more than one’s neighbours; and there is no feeling of privation in not being able to procure those things that nobody else has. The white man’s privations may be many, but they are inevitable; he has all that is procurable in his situation, and far more than those around him. He therefore has a comfortable feeling of wealth, the more pleasant because unexpected.