representatives which makes possible the holdingdown of many by one. Without it, there might be required almost as many Tommy Atkinses as there are natives to be held. That this sahib quality has been widely furnished, that it does wonderful work, I can stoutly testify. I can also testify that it is not wise to have one solitary sahib in Zeila, as was the case when I went thence into Africa. Only two were at Adis Abeba, one of these leaving with me. Only one at a frontier post near the eastern border of the Soudan. Only forty white men at Khartoum in June, 1900. (The smallness of this number was a surprise, even to those who counted noses at my suggestion.) One only, as related in these pages, at Kashgar ; and so in many a lost spot. Then suddenly, because the one man is overworked (as I saw at Zeila), there comes a war which might have been avoided had there been time to get into the hinter-land. There would be time to feel the country ahead of one, as I know had not been, could not be, done on the Abyssinia-Soudan frontier. Need one say anything further as to the fatal lack of good men before and during the great Boer war? Not every white man has the sahib quality. That is the important thing. So it is that the ever-growing demands of administration, and the ever-growing demands of a new competition in commerce, run almost beyond the output even of the mighty womb which has sent its sons to girdle the world.
A conservation of the British Empire seems to me a matter of maximum importance to all the world. That it should be conserved, it must, I think, be conservative. The raid into Tibet I believe to have
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