106 [No. 99 ECONOMIC CONDITIONS Congo, with its three portions of railway (859 kilo metres) and its 2,770 kilometres of river to Bukama, where the line to Elisabethville begins, cannot in the long run compete either with the line to Benguela or with the Beira line, especially as shortened by the variant route of Salisbury -Broken Hill, and that accordingly two further routes should be created ; the first should follow the Congo, the Kasai, and the Sankuru to Lusambo ( 1,300 kilometres) , where naviga tion normally ceases, then be carried by rail to Kabalo, the terminus of the line from Lake Tanganyika, then proceed to Pweto on Lake Mweru , and possibly thence to the south of Lake Tanganyika ; the second should be entirely a railway route, extending from Elisabeth viile via Bukama to a point on the line from Matadi to Léopoldville, probably Thysville, west of the valley of the Inkisi. The first of these lines would combat the competition of the Tanganyika line ; the second would compete, it is hoped successfully , with both the Benguela and Beira routes, between which competition will be minimized by the existence of the pooling agreement of 1908. The funds required for these great projects, however, would obviously be considerably more than the Colony is likely to be able to afford for a consider able period to come.

(iii) The Character of the Native, whose labour is indispensable for all important development. The native is , doubtless as the result of environment and heredity, by nature disinclined to hard work, and he has been accustomed to delegate as much toil as possible to his numerous wives and domestic slaves, and to regard this state of things as ideal. Moreover, of late years the ravages of sleeping-sickness have -added to the disinclination and inability of the native to work, while the episodes of the State regime have inevitably tended to make every native detest work.