Note 226 — Chapter XXVII · FRENCH AND BRITISH MANAGEMENT IN WEST AFRICA

One of the pet arguments of the authorities consists in invoking the benefits which have accrued to the people of the Protectorate since the passing of the Protectorate Ordinance in the matter of putting down the slave trade. For these benefits the natives, says officialdom, ought to be delighted to pay a tax. Possibly they would have paid it in time, more or less willingly, had they been approached in a different spirit. But, so far as the slave trade is concerned, the argument is singularly weakened by the circumstance that Sir F. Cardew publicly declared in 1895 that the slave traffic had “practically disappeared within the Protectorate.”