There is a man living in Rome who is said to have been imprisoned on Devil's Island for several years. His name is Gen. Paolo Tibaldi, who was sentenced to life imprisonment on the island for conspiring against Napoleon III. He says that when he was there the island was a bare rock without a tree or a blade of grass, and the heat of the sun was terrible. The provisions supplied daily by the Government were a pound and a half of the worst kind of bread, for each convict, a piece of old meat or salt fat, beans or rice, a little oil, and also a kind of spirits called tafla. The general claims that the treatment to which the captives were subjected was most severe. They were chained by the keepers, fed on bread and water for months, and beaten with ropes. Five thousand dollars was raised in France to rescue General Tibaldi, but that only made matters worse, and he suffered added torments. Finally, public opinion in France combined with the press in his behalf, and the General was freed. * * * * * The trouble in West Africa promises to become such an important item of current history that it might be well to look into it more deeply, and try and get a clear idea of the difficulty. France undoubtedly wishes to have dominion over the countries lying between her western and eastern possessions in Africa. On the west coast she owns the Senegal River and the town of St. Louis. The Central Soudan also belongs to France, and on the east coast, opposite Aden, the two towns of Obok and Tanjurrah fly the French flag. The problem has been to acquire the lands intervening, so as to make one unbroken line. You can see what an advantage this would be; for, with the Nile on one side and the Niger on the other, it would be comparatively easy to ship valuable products from the interior to the markets of the world. Since 1880, France has spent great sums of money in trying to bridge over the space lying between her possessions, and step by step her empire has pushed its way from the Senegal to the Niger. England had been confined to the coast. She owned Sierra Leone, the Gambia Settlements, the Colony of Lagos, and the Niger Protectorate. The Royal Niger Company owned the hinterland of Lagos, which means the country back of Lagos, and this is the only hinterland that England did own. France, owning the country back of the English Colonies, effectually checks their development. Until 1890 there was a dispute between England and France about their West African possessions. In 1890 there was a difficulty about territory on the Lower Niger, and this was settled for a little while by a treaty which marked out the British "spheres of influence" by a line drawn from Say on the Niger to Lake Chad. Say is directly west of Sokoto, and you can easily find Lake Chad on your map, for it is a very large lake. To the south, the British were supposed to control "all that properly belongs to the kingdom of Sokoto."