Lessons to Northern Neighbours.

The Congo State will doubtless recognise its profit by the advent of the railway to Bulawayo and the extension of the line towards its southern borders, and the arrangements of the Government will be such as to ensure respect for boundaries and to teach the native tribes that transgression of such will be dangerous.

The British Government have a valuable object lesson for the development of African colonies. For over two hundred years the West African colonies have been stagnating for lack of such means of communication. They have been unable to utilise their resources. Their natural pretensions to the hinterlands have been grievously curtailed, and what ought to have been British is now French. Nyasaland has also too long suffered from Imperial parsimony. The function of government should comprise something more than police duty or the collection of taxes. The removal of causes injurious to health and life, and the establishment of communication as required by circumstances of climate, and needful to augment commerce, are just as urgent as the prevention of lawlessness and the collection of imposts. The climate of Nyasaland has slain more valuable men than the assegais of the Angoni. Against the latter the Government sent their Sikhs; against the former they have done nothing. Many of the sick colonists might have been saved, if, when weakened by anaemia, a little railway past the Shire Rapids had taken them quickly through the malarious land. If it be worth while to retain and administer Nyasaland, it is surely worth while to supply the population with certain means to send the fruits of their industry to the world’s markets, and to enable them to receive the necessaries of existence without endangering their lives in the effort or risking the loss of their goods. Therefore, to a Government that has shown such dread of constructing an insignificant railway a hundred miles in length, the enterprise of the Chartered Company in constructing one five hundred miles long—and starting immediately upon an extension two hundred and twenty miles—at the cost of one and three-quarter millions, must be exceedingly stimulative. The antique and barbarous method of porterage should be abolished in every British colony, more especially in tropical colonies, where exposure to sun and rain means death to white and black.