superabundant; and as for ground nuts, they were simply dug up as prudence or necessity dictated.  Some thirty years ago a cask or two of palm oil was sent home from the Gold Coast; it met so ready a sale that it was further inquired after, and the total amount now imported into England ranges from 25,000 to 30,000 tons annually.  The exportation of ground nuts is even larger; but, owing to our excise on soap, they had heretofore gone principally to France—–­to Marseilles especially.

“Of these two articles, it is to be observed, the Western Coast of Africa appears to have a monopoly; and with respect to palm oil, it is further to be remarked, that it is exactly behind those ports and up those rivers, which were formerly the great nests of the slave trade, that its production is largest; and just as the slave trade there has been crushed, a commerce in palm oil has sprung up and replaced it.  There are men alive who recollect the slave trade flourishing on the Gold Coast; it has long been extinct there, and palm oil is now largely exported.  It is but a very few years ago since that traffic appeared to be irrepressible at the mouths of the Niger:  it is now expelled, and thence Liverpool obtains, instead, its supplies of palm oil.  So also, later still, at Whydah, and the other ports of the kingdom of Dahomy, and along the Lagoon, which connects Dahomy with the Benin River, there the Spanish slave dealers are themselves inaugurating a commerce in palm oil.  Already the trade in that quarter is considerable, and it would have extended much more rapidly than it has done, were it not that disorder and warfare in the interior have been promoted and prolonged by the indiscreet zeal of some of our own naval officers and by the desire of some of our missionaries to rule at Abeeokutu, at Lagos, and at Badagray.  When, however, order and tranquillity are restored, a most important trade will undoubtedly arise there.  A generation ago, when palm oil was merely an article of food, there was, we have said, no property in palm trees.  Since, however, a large foreign demand has arisen for this oil, the plantations, as already they are called, begin to be cared for; and lately the title to some of them has been disputed in our courts on the Gold Coast:  a contention which constitutes the first evidence we have received of the value of land, not actually under their own cultivation, being recognised by the natives.  Thus the feeling of property and the desire for accumulation are springing up out of the palm oil trade; and they are everywhere the germs of nascent civilisation.  It is no light question, therefore, thus involved in an increased demand for this article; it may produce African consequences of incalculable importance to the whole human race.  It is in France hitherto that the great consumption of ground nut oil has occurred.  It is there used in the manufacture of soaps, which, though preferred abroad, are little used in England—­very much because of the Excise laws.  The specific gravity of the soap made out of ground nut oil is higher than those laws permitted; in consequence we could neither make it for our own use nor for foreign exportation; and thus France has substantially the soap trade of the world.  By the repeal of the duty, England will be enabled to compete—­in this, as in all other trades—­with France abroad.”