THE EUROPEAN SLAVE TRADE 345 ments. What I have said in regard to the earlier trade is, I think, sufficient to prove the statement with which I set out, that if the original native of the coast is inferior to the native of the interior, the influence exercised by-Europe on the coast has been very different from that exercised by Europe in the interior in days when black poets were welcomed at the court of Cordova, and the University of Timbuctoo exchanged knowledge with the universities of Spain.

There is one other point to which I am anxious to draw attention. It is that, with the exception of Mr.

Maclean's temporary extension of British influence on the Gold Coast as Governor for the Merchant Government, between 1838 and 1842, no colony up to the last decade of the nineteenth century extended beyond the immediate seaboard. From the date of the abolition of the slave trade the constant policy of the British Government was to withdraw as far as possible from any intermeddling with native affairs, and from any attempt to establish British influence, or to incur political responsibilities, upon the coast. It was as a matter of duty, and mainly for the purpose of enforcing the abolition of the over-sea slave trade, that Great Britain in 1808 assumed the government of Sierra Leone, and in 182 1, after the abolition of the existing Chartered Company, annexed to it the settlements of the Gambia and the Gold Coast. The greatest care was taken to repudiate responsibility for native affairs outside the limits of the small English settlements. As late as 1865, it was stated before a Committee of the House of Commons that British territory on the Gambia was so small, that when the native tribes fought with each other, "all their bullets, without meaning us any harm, came into the British barracks."

In the Gold Coast Colony, Fantees and Ashantees fought with each other on the sea coast, and an English victory obtained over them in 1827 took place, not in the interior, but at Accra.

The settlement of the country and the policy of the