CHAPTER LII ECONOMIC RESOURCES OF NORTHERN NIGERIA What are we to do with it ? is perhaps the question which will arise in many minds as they think of the vastness of the territory which has thus been brought under British rule. To this question the growing recognition of the value of the tropics, to which allusion was made in the first chapter of this book, will gradually bring the full answer. No one can so foretell the course of history as to know yet all that may be done with it.

To those to whom the liberation of many millions from the curse of slavery, and the introduction of the elements of a finer civilisation into the local life of the interior of Africa, do not in the meantime give a sufficiently satisfactory reply, it may be briefly said that we shall presumably do with it as we have done with India. We shall administer it, trade with it, and help both directly and indirectly in the development of those natural resources which form at present, as Sir Robert Schomberg said more than fifty years ago of British Guiana, the "buried treasures" of its soil. When it was decided, towards the middle of the last century, to withdraw from the West Coast of Africa, the commercial use of many valuable commodities of the tropics was unknown, the existence of others was ignored ; but science and experiment are every day demonstrating the value of new products. The forest areas of the tropics are rapidly proving to be reserves of wealth no less real than that which has for centuries 48s