THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE 497 One is a radical difficulty which the development of intercourse and the promotion of native prosperity can alone remove. Natives are ready to buy, but they do not possess in sufficient quantity a marketable equivalent for European goods. Native manufactures have no value in European markets. Horses and cattle are too cumbersome for export. Cowries are only locally useful.

Exchange must therefore be based solely on produce which has value in European markets, and which is sufficiently portable for export under present conditions. Even this to be profitable must be in bulk, and retail trade is impracticable while small payments have to be made in kind. The same difficulty attaches to the collection of Government taxes, which for the present have to be paid for the greater part in kind. The solution evidently is to be found in the encouragement of a surplus production in native industries of which the produce can be profitably exported, combined with the introduction of a cash currency as a medium of general exchange. In this way native existing industries of the kind most valuable to Europe will, by a natural process, be expanded, and new ones will be sought which will gradually extend the basis of an export trade. The stimulus to this movement will be supplied by the desire to possess articles procurable only with the required forms of produce, and though the operation of the movement may require time, it may on the whole be trusted to correspond with the amount of enterprise displayed on the part of European firms in introducing new commodities to the native markets. Already, as has been seen, a good deal has been done by the administration in the direction of introducing a cash currency, and silver coins are coming into general use.

It has been seen, in describing the early history of the Royal Niger Company, that its founders looked to the northern states of Haussaland for the ultimate success of its trading operations. Here they expected to meet with returns which should repay all the adminis-2 I