CHAPTER XXXVII ENGLAND AND FRANCE ON THE LOWER NIGER The Committee of 1865 may be taken to represent the lowest ebb of British sentiment with regard to the West African colonies. The evidence which was given before it forms a bulky volume, and, in reading through its pages, there is no escape from the conclusion that the result of three hundred years of occupation and of trade with the West Coast was to leave us with no interest there which could appeal to the British public as justifying the expenditure of British money, and the employment of British officials to defend. Upwards of two centuries had been spent in developing the West African slave trade, the better part of one century had been spent in suppressing it, and when, in 1865, it became possible to report that the over-sea slave trade was practically abolished, the only proposal that appeared to be warranted by the existing condition of affairs in West Africa was that, with the exception of a coaling station to be retained at Sierra Leone, Great Britain should abandon a position of which the advantages seemed to be purely nominal upon the coast. The principal evidence which was given before the Committee went to show that British settlement had no extension, that British administration claimed no authority, and that British trade had no interests which the increase of political influence could assist. The private trade which remained outside the slave trade was small, and was reported in two out of the four settlements to be rapidly declining.

But though this is the position which is emphatically 348