BRITISH ADMINISTRATION 419 ingly voted for any full development of the Nigerian Protectorate. In these circumstances the wishes of the Government and of the country, if they had to be condensed into one phrase of instruction to the High Commissioner, would perhaps best have been rendered by the words, ** Go slow!"

But events upon the spot refused to wait. From the moment in which the British flag ran up at Lokoja on the 1st of January 1900, the High Commissioner and his staff found themselves taxed to the utmost limits of their capacity in the effort to keep pace with the developments which hurried them along.

The first desire of the High Commissioner upon taking up the duties of his position would naturally have been to give effect to British treaty obligations by establishing residents at the native courts, and proceeding to open friendly relations throughout the Protectorate.

He found himself face to face with a chaos of civil and inter-tribal war, in which his immediate duty was to endeavour to ascertain the disposition towards the Government which he represented of the dominant powers. He had also everything to learn about the actual condition of the northern country. The civil staff allotted for the purpose of founding an administration was very small, and its numbers were liable to be reduced by illness and leave. The Ashantee War, which had broken out in another portion of West Africa, shortly claimed all the troops of the West African Frontier Force that could be spared, and the South African War drawing to itself all the best military activity of the nation, rendered it difficult to obtain efficient officers for the remainder of the regiment. Almost singlehanded in every administrative department, the little group who formed the government at Lokoja felt that they had every reason during the first year of the administration to wish for their own sakes to "go slow."

There was the machinery of administration to establish, of which the seat was temporarily fixed at Jebba, where the military headquarters had been formed. There