HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 123

What he failed to mention was the small string he
kept in his fingers. When candidates of equal merit
were presented—and that was very easy to arrange—
the Presideht himself had the right of choice.

But one had to admit that this man had energy
and courage; he was worth a dozen Kings, and his
hands were comparatively clean. He had been Mr.
King's secretary of state, but the League of Nations
commission, which had found the President per-
sonally responsible for shipping forced labour to the
little dreadful Spanish island, Fernando Po, and for
countenancing die mild form of slavery that enabled
a man to pawn his children, had exonerated Barclay.
The only real blot in the eyes of the outside world
on his administration was the Kru campaign
described in the Blue Book from which I have
quoted, and for that the man on the spot was chiefly
responsible, Colonel Elwood Davis, the black mer-
cenary from North America. No President before
Barclay had dared to tour the interior. Mr. King
had travelled rapidly down from the Sierra Leone
border with two hundred soldiers, but the President
now had with him only thirty men. I could see
almost the whole lot of them marching up and down
the compound. The tribes, of course, since Mr.
King's day, had been disarmed by Colonel Davis,
they had no more than a few guns in every town,
but they had swords and spears and cutlasses.

The President, it is true, didn't linger. He travelled
very rapidly, forcing the pace, up paths he was not
expected to use, and his inquiries were very brief.
I have said that the natives in Bolahun had no hopes
that Mr. Reeves would be ever brought to book.