The Native Races Committee’s suggestions carry us then no further. The alternative line of action I suggest is the following:—
The liquor traffic in Southern Nigeria (as everywhere else in Western Africa), must be carefully watched.
It is not now an active evil in Southern Nigeria. It need never become one if certain things are done.
Those things are—
A. Frequent analyses of the imported article. Severe punishment if bad stuff is going in.
B. Continuation of the legislation, consistently followed since 1905, of taxing, over and above the general tax, higher degrees of alcoholic strength pro rata. Perhaps pursuing that still further by prohibiting altogether the importation of liquor above a certain strength.
C. Keeping duties to the level of safety, raising them whenever possible, but never so highly that the population will altogether cease to buy, and take to distilling, which by the pot-still process is the easiest thing in the world.
D. Not permitting the proportion which the spirit trade now bears to the general trade to increase—that means watching, and increasing the duty when possible. At every sign of the present proportion being increased, another increase of duty should be made.
E. Restricting, if possible, the present proportion, by degrees either by the policy of successive increases of duty; or by an arrangement with the merchants (very difficult to bring about, owing to the advent of new firms; but not, perhaps, impossible), whereby they would be precluded from exceeding in the spirit branch of their trade a certain fixed proportion to their general trade turn-over—the imports of each firm being calculated on a basis which would establish a decrease in the total volume of the spirit trade. This arrangement, if it were possible, would have, really, the same effect as judicious increases of duty, by making the imported article dearer.
F. The creation of a sitting committee in Lagos—sitting and permanent—the members of which would be gazetted and paid a small salary: with two branches, one in the Central and one in the Eastern Province, and (if necessary) with corresponding members in several of the more important centres—with the object of creating in each province a sort of bureau of information on the spirit trade to which every one would feel free to communicate.