labourers are more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will continue to stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger. Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in all tropical countries, is largely a matter of temperament, and the stolid sons of the Fatherland seem, strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by the demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily than either the English or the French. The Englishman's sense of justice and the Frenchman's sense of humour are their chief assets as successful colonisers and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial official, who is generally serious by nature and almost always domineering as the result of his training, possesses neither of these invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. The native goes back to his village with a bleeding back and hatred in his heart, and, as likely as not, a bloody, costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues. The African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown and very aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job for school-teachers instead of drill sergeants, and the sooner the imperial government appreciates that fact the better.