404 History of Inland Transport 



construction, river clearing," etc., while of Northern Nigeria 

 he says : " When we remember that a densely-populated area, 

 twice as large as the United Kingdom, and little more than a 

 decade removed from the horrors of slavery, savage warfare 

 and wholesale human sacrifices, is run by about 300 Europeans 

 on 500,000 a year, and is rapidly arriving at conditions 

 favourable to a great development of commerce " such 

 conditions including the fact that a trader can now travel 

 from Lagos to Zaria in three days by rail, instead of taking 

 three weeks, as before " it is, perhaps, a record in the annals 

 of British expansion." 



As for the civilising effects of railways in West Africa, 

 Mr P. A. Renner, an educated native, said at a Royal Colonial 

 Institute meeting on May 24, 1910 : "In the few years I have 

 lived on the coast I have seen an improvement which has so 

 astonished us as to make us almost worship the white man. 

 Previously to the introduction of railways the clan feeling 

 and tribal strifes and feuds were very rife, and the people of 

 one village would scarcely visit those of another. Now all this 

 is changed." 



When one looks back from the work the railway is doing 

 to-day, in all these different directions, to those very primitive 

 beginnings of which I have told in earlier chapters, the whole 

 story appears to be far more suggestive of romance than of 

 sober fact and reality. From the colliery rail-way along which 

 John Buddie's " waggon-man " led his horse, encouraging it 

 to greater exertion with a handful of hay, to the railway that 

 conveys, not only passengers, but goods, at express speed, that 

 has revolutionised our industrial, our commercial and our 

 social conditions, and is now consolidating our Imperial 

 interests and effecting the civilisation of once barbarian lands, 

 it is, indeed, a far cry ; yet the sequence cf events can readily 

 be traced, while all has been done within a century and a half 

 of the world's history. 



