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serious waste on the largesses. There must, then, have been some honest policy underlying them—not a mere currying of favour by indiscriminate giving. A few hints in our authorities may enable us to guess what that policy was. We learn incidentally from Dio Cassius (LX. 25, 7) that the money was not always given at one uniform rate, but that the figure ranged from 75 up to 312 denarii. Again, we notice that Trajan and his successors took a keen interest in the maintenance of the population of Rome and Italy-no doubt with an eye to the needs of the army and civil service. Coins, too, contribute something to the solution. A favourite type of the second century is that of "Spes Populi Romani," the figure of a woman holding an opening flower. Just as the "Spes Augusta" is the hope of the imperial house centred in the heir, so is the "Spes Populi Romani " the hope based on the rising generation of Roman citizens. There is good reason, then, for thinking that allowance over and above the minimum rate was made for the fathers of families, and that the emperors were definitely striving by this form of assistance to encourage the bringing up of larger families and to arrest that race-suicide which, while most prevalent in the upper classes, undoubtedly spread to all ranks in Rome. However much we may deplore the system of doles, it is only fair to assign what credit is due to the emperors for endeavouring to turn it to useful purposes.

But, when all is said and done, ancient Rome stands to us as a warning rather than as an example. We see how easily a system of doles, created to palliate unemployment, may strike permanent root in the State; how very precarious are the prospects of its direction towards wiser ends, and how it tends to confirm and exaggerate the evils which it is originally designed to correct. One, at least, of the causes of the decline and fall of Rome was the decay of the old Roman stock; and the doles, which gave partial relief, without teaching men to help themselves, must bear their share of blame for the disastrous issue.

HAROLD MATTINGLY

EARLY NIGER EXPLORATION

1. The Voyage of the Dayspring, being the Journal of the late Sir John Hawley Glover, R.N., G.C.M.G., together with some account of the expedition up the Niger River in 1857. Edited by A. G. G. HASTINGS. The Bodley Head. 1926.

2.

The Travels of Mungo Park. 1816.

3. The Journals of Commander Clapperton and Richard Lander. 1829.

THE publication of "The Voyage of the Dayspring" adds

a new chapter to the early history of the opening-up of Nigeria. The voyage itself took place nearly seventy years ago, but it carries the mind back one hundred and thirty years to the travels of Mungo Park, whose instructions from the African Exploration Association were, as he himself says, very plain

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I was directed to pass on to the river Niger, either by the way Bambouk or by such other route as should be found most convenient. That I should ascertain the course and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river, and that I should be afterwards at liberty to return to Europe either by the way of the Gambia or by such other route as under all the then existing circumstances of my situation and prospects, should appear to me to be most advisable.

These directions were indeed almost ludicrous in their precision. And yet how many to-day have read Park's "Travels," and know with what desperate endeavour he accomplished his task? But for the quaintness of its ring, his name itself would, we fear, for most to-day have been buried in oblivion.

It was Park, a Scottish doctor who, at 24 years of age, lifted the veil which shrouded the course of the Niger from European eyes. From the Middle Ages, historians, geographers and travellers had puzzled over it. Even the Arabians who knew much about Africa were here at fault. They all knew by hearsay of this marvellous river; some in fact had seen it in its upper reaches, but its source and mouth were unknown. Did it, as some judged (Herodotus hints at it) find its way east and go to swell the waters of the Nile? The river of Egypt was a highway of commerce, but what was this other on whose waters no traffic was borne ? Instead, caravans from the Central Sudan wearily

made their way north-east to Tripoli or westwards to Gambia. From the latter country Englishmen thought to penetrate the mystery of the Niger as early as the seventeenth century. They deemed that the Gambia and Senegal rivers were part of the Niger system. They had as their guide statements such as that of Jeremy Collier, which make good the lack of essentials by boldness and breadth of outline: "It rises in Ethiopia" (a welldefined spot!) "from a lake of the same name, and running westward divides Nigritia into two parts. After a course and the reception of divers rivers, whose names are unknown to us, it falls into the Atlantic ocean in six great streams which are all south of Cape Verde, except one."

When this fallacy was disposed of another took its place. Men thought that in the Congo River the Niger emptied itself into the sea. To Park himself the mystery was only beginning to clear just before his death. But it persisted in official circles even longer, and as late as the year 1816 the British Government sent an expedition from the west source of the Niger which Park had discovered, to work down-stream and meet a second expedition working up from the Congo mouth. And this despite the fact that eight years before a German geographer by a happy process of deduction arrived at the true conclusion that the Niger took a sharp southerly bend and emptied itself into the Gulf of Guinea. It was not till 1830 that the course of the river was placed beyond doubt by Richard and John Lander who, working on the same route as Mungo Park, drifted in a canoe down the Niger, past its confluence with the Benue, and reached the open sea 300 miles further south.

There were other Englishmen, too, who sought to pluck the heart out of this mystery-to discover not merely the Niger, but the great cities of Timbuktu, Kano and Kuka near its banks, of which persistent rumours had reached them, rumours that had stronger warrant than the mere pages of Leo Africanus. While Park was operating from the west, John Brown, from the Upper Nile, reached Darfur. Hornemann, sent by the African Association, made his way from Fezzan across the desert in 1800, and died in the Nupe territory, in Nigeria—it was thirty years before the place of his death came to light. From Tripoli, Major Denham, Captain Clapperton and Dr. Oudney, financed by the British Government, disappeared into the desert in the year

1823. Two years later, Denham and Clapperton reappeared. They had a strange story to tell to a wondering world of a feudal civilization, far removed from the tribalism and ignorance of the southern and western coast-dwellers, of nations that in build and feature resembled the Egyptians or the Berbers, of flocks and herds dispersed on wide terrains, of country that in the spring was like the rolling grass-lands of Central Asia. They told of manufactures of cloth and of dyestuffs superior to those of Europe, of the cities of Kano and Kuka, whose inhabitants were numbered by their tens of thousands, and whose fairs were the heart-beats of trade arteries that pulsed through the wastes of the Sahara to the far Mediterranean and the marts of Europe.

The mysterious Foulah (or Fulani), whose treatment of Mungo Park was marked by extreme harshness and indifference to his sufferings, were then at the height of their power; the traders of the Sudan—the Hausa tribes—while retaining their vitality, had yielded the princely power to these Moslem overlords, whose ascendancy seemed to be based on some innate dominating personality rather than on numbers or military prowess. The white men who had appeared out of the desert were entertained with the same deference as ambassadors to a European court. They found themselves among a people fully acquainted with the old sects of the Eastern Church, and amongst whom some echo of the far-off Crusades, with their knightly courtesies, seemed to have lingered. Clapperton, with one brief touch, reveals a little of his own simple vanity, and much of the standard of civilization of the people to whom he had come. He was neither an ethnologist nor a scientist-only a man of great physical strength and courage who had in his time served in the merchant service and the navy, and roughed it in the backwoods of Canada. He had reached the outskirts of Kano in the evening and thought that nothing could be better than to impress the strange people with his presence. So for his formal entry into the city he donned his naval uniform, but to his chagrin found that it excited no more interest that it would in Portsmouth town. He was dealing not with the curiosity of the savage, but with the finer feelings of a civilized community.

Exploration in Nigeria in the first half of the nineteenth century took a terrible toll of life-almost solely the outcome of malaria, against which there was then no known preventive.

The mosquito worked away unchecked, and explorers continuously struggled against fever or dysentery. They travelled without those ordinary comforts of European life which to-day are the commonplaces of the tropics; they tried to live on native food as soon as their scanty home supplies ran short. They could not bring themselves to adapt their clothing to their surroundings. The khaki shorts and workmanlike garb of to-day would have appeared undignified and a betrayal of nationality to Clapperton donning his naval uniform, or to Park, who, so long as his suit lasted or the avaricious chieftains allowed him to retain his spare clothing, went about Central Africa " in a thick blue fustian coat with gilt buttons, keeping his precious notes in the crown of his top hat." "The Voyage of the Dayspring" itself shows one of the members of that expedition wearing a wig in the wilderness. No wonder they died in far-off places. Those who, after one successful expedition, found Africa and its loneliness luring them back again almost invariably succumbed.

Park, after his first discovery of the Niger, returned in 1805 and, again travelling west from Gambia, struck the Niger near its source. The few survivors of the terrible land journey made in the rainy season embarked on the river and passing down it for over 1000 miles through what is now French territory, perished on the way by violence or disease, until Park himself and the last three white survivors were swept to destruction in the rapids near Boussa. Major Haughton, Park's predecessor, disappeared after a few months, and his grave in a lonely wood was pointed out to Park. Oudney died in the arms of Clapperton, who tended him with a woman's care. Mr. Hastings, the editor and commentator of "The Voyage of the Dayspring," brings home by a simple remark the utter pathos of these far-off graves: "I know where Oudney lies buried near the little hamlet of Madachi, in the Hadeija district, on the northern boundary of the Protectorate. The grave was undiscovered for eighty years."

Clapperton on a second visit took the same route as Park: his three white companions all died of fever. He and his faithful servant, Richard Lander, pushed on and again reached Kano. There, filled with disappointment at the impediments which the local sultan placed in the way of his further progress, he too died and Lander came stumbling back to civilization, but the mystery had possessed him. They were all-though they hardly realized

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