THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE 499 employment of animal transport, and between Zungeru and Kano a fairly good cart road, fit for the employment of wheeled vehicles, will soon have been completed. The opening of navigable waterways has also already placed some rich districts within easy reach of European trade, but the urgent need of the Protectorate from every point of view, political and commercial, is obviously for the introduction of railways. These need not in the first instance be expensive. The country is generally open, the gradients of the main routes are easy, and there are no impassable obstacles which call for costly engineering works. The development of trade must be necessarily gradual, and in order to keep pace with it, a railway so light as to be little more than a tramway, along which waggons could be drawn by steam, might, in the first instance, be laid from a navigable port on the Niger to Zungeru, and thence along the route which has been cleared for the construction of a cart-road to Zaria and Kano. This is the caravan route which traverses some of the richest and most populous districts of the country. When the markets of this district had been worked, it would perhaps be time enough to extend a similar cheap service from Kano to the capital of Bornu. If the trade which resulted were sufficient to justify further expense, the construction of more solid railways would rapidly follow. Transport in a peaceful country is not in truth a difficulty. It is little more than a calculation of profit and loss.

The administration of Northern Nigeria is but five years old. Its duty has been to bring under control a congeries of states, of which the internal disorders necessitated, in the first instance, a resort to the plain argument of military conquest. The administration has not in the short period of its existence been able to do more than to affirm the conquest of the country, and to create a skeleton of the machinery of government which it will be for time to bring to its full perfection. But a beginning has been made. The framework of adminis-