368 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY of the maritime districts, and that the Directors felt that the "ultimate and permanent prosperity of the territories must depend still more on a widely spread and properly directed culture of indigo, tobacco, cotton, and other products," which were grown in the interior. The trade with the south was prosperous ; but, while the Company did its principal work on the coast, it looked forward to opening the northern territories.

*'We can hardly Impress too strongly on our shareholders," the Governor said in the same speech of 1889, *' the fact that our hopes of future prosperity rest far less on the lower regions of the Niger . . . than upon the higher and inner and recently explored regions acquired at great expense of money and of energy." Throughout the political life of the Company this view was constantly impressed upon the shareholders, and at a very early period the Company marked, in a manner which did credit alike to its foresight and its enlightenment, its perception of the difference between the two divisions of its territories. The consumption of liquor by the pagan natives of the coast has been, through the whole period of European intercourse with them, a hardly less prolific source of demoralisation than the slave trade Itself. In the lower river the Company yielded to circumstances, and cheap European spirits formed one of the principal articles of importation for purposes of the barter trade.

But among the Mohammedan peoples of the north the use of alcoholic liquor Is forbidden by their religion, and in 1887, before prohibition within certain latitudes became general under the rules agreed to by the Brussels Conference, the Niger Company, desirous of defending the markets of the interior from the invasion of this curse, fixed a line at the back of Its coast territories beyond which it absolutely forbade the importation of liquor.

But though the trade of the northern territories was regarded from the beginning as likely to prove beyond all comparison more valuable than that of the lower