Not alone the city but the entire Province of Kano is ruled by the Emir, who appoints native Judges, and from him subsidiary Chiefs and village Headmen, through Chiefs of districts, take instructions and render reports. We rule through the native rulers, the leaders of the people. A very brief survey of its operation in Kano City may not be out of place. The entire administration of justice has been placed in native hands, except where a European is involved. The Alkali, as the Judge is called, decides cases civil and criminal, framing his decisions on custom and usage based on the Koranic law. That, purged as it has been of corruption and inhumanity, is approved by the population, who are overwhelmingly Mohamedan, as being right and just, much more than would any application of English forms and methods. The Alkali is paid a fixed salary from the public Treasury and no longer, as formerly, has a share of the monetary penalties exacted. Moreover, although acting under the general administration of the Emir, the Alkali is irremovable, as Judges are in England. These features of a regularly-paid, ample salary and fixity of office give the Alkali—and other Alkalis as well—an independence of judgment uninfluenced by temptation of bribery. The Governor can, of course, remove an Alkali, and though there is no formal appeal from an Alkali’s Court, which at Kano is empowered to deliver death sentence in a case of murder, all the decisions can be altered by the Resident or revised by the English Chief Justice attached to the Governor’s headquarter staff. [Illustration: AN ENTRANCE TO THE COURTYARD OF THE EMIR’S PALACE.] [Illustration: THE PRINCIPAL MOSQUE.] Judicial and administrative functions are separate. The Alkali decides punishment and the Emir’s officers carry it out, just as in England, though Nigeria practice is the outcome of native usage. A single decision of the Alkali is selected as an example. A young constable complained that his wife—who looked his senior by several years—entrusted with some cattle for sale had appropriated the proceeds and transferred her affections to another married man with whom she had dissipated the money claimed by her rightful lord. The woman admitted the action but put in as defence that what she had sold had been purchased with her own earnings and was her individual belonging. She proved that to the Alkali, who thereupon dismissed the charge of theft but held that if the woman did not promptly return to her husband the new domestic partner she had taken unto herself must monetarily recompense the original one for the loss of connubial felicity and to the extent of the wedding portion he paid for the angel on the hearth, minus a proportion for the years of married life.