424 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY valuable. The Accounting Department, which he had used in connection with the organisation of the West African Frontier Force, became, with a little reorganisation, the Treasury of the new administration. The vessels which formed the material of a Marine Department were taken over from the Niger Company. The staff included the necessary doctors and legal officers for the formation of Medical and Legal Departments. The Public Works Department, after an unfortunate preliminary delay, during which the European staff was left almost without houses, was formed, under the direction of Mr. Eaglesome, an engineer of Indian experience, into a body of which the efficiency and economy soon became a subject of considerable local pride. The rest of the staff, loyally supported by a few white noncommissioned officers and civil subordinates, was chiefly composed of that fine type of young Englishmen who, whether as soldiers or civilians, have it in their minds to serve their country, to the best of their ability, in some adventurous capacity which will take them out of the common round of comfortable life. Their experience of Africa was mostly nil, but they had the training of the public school, the army, and the university, which fits men equally for the assumption of responsibility and for loyal subordination to authority. They were ready to go anywhere and to do anything, and with the few inevitable exceptions, who were rapidly weeded out, represented, in the eyes of the High Commissioner, the very best stuff of which the English nation is made.

He had in them the instruments that he wanted, and he worked them without mercy, as hard as he worked himself. The staff was short-handed. There was three men's work for every man to do, and during the initial stage of the establishment of British authority in the country, it is not too much to say that the whole of the staff, civil as well as military, gave themselves with entire devotion to their task. There was little of alleviation or of pleasure in the early conditions. Miserable houses, bad food, a malarial climate, and ceaseless responsibility.