TRANSFER OF TERRITORIES 371 its troops were withdrawn the deposed emir rallied his defeated followers, assumed again the supreme authority of which he had been deprived, and maintained his province in a state of revolt against British authority north of the river. It became clear that conquest without occupation, or the establishment of some form of British authority in the conquered provinces, would result only in the creation of a line of impenetrably hostile border states, with which neither trade nor any peaceful relations could be maintained.

Troubles on the western border, resulting in the agreement of 1898, and the consequent surrender of the charter, gave the Company no opportunity of dealing with the situation which was thus created. The authority which had been successfully asserted over the pagan tribes of the lower river, and which had not shrunk from the first shock of conflict with the forces of Mohammedanism, was withdrawn at this critical and interesting moment.

Thus it came about that when British administration was officially established in the interior, it found itself limited in fact to territory of which the northern line was fixed by the Company's stations upon the river, and to the western province of Borgu, which, subsequently to the formation of the West African Frontier Force, had been organised as a military province outside the territories of the company.

The duty which lay before the first British High Commissioner was to organise the territorities of Northern Nigeria for administration. The whole of these territories had placed themselves nominally under the protection of Great Britain. They extended roughly, as will be remembered, from 7° to 14° north latitude, and, including Borgu, from 3" to 14° east longitude. They covered an area of 350,000 square miles, or about onethird of the size of British India, and they lay almost wholly in the area occupied by those finer races of the Soudan whose touch with civilisation had from time immemorial been from the north. Never before in the