150 
EUROPE AND AFRICA 
and considerably extended since the war, but in 1923 pri- 
mary schools numbered only about 850 with 27,500 boys and 
1700 girls, or only about one in forty-five of the population 
of school age. The school system is designed to give to the 
whole of French West Africa a common language — French 
— to give practical training in agriculture, in crafts, and in 
medicine, and to develop only on the most restricted scale 
higher literary education. The government is attaching the 
greatest importance to sanitation and medical work, though 
the program is greatly hampered for lack of funds and has 
scarcely been begun in earnest. Anxiety regarding the 
population of France itself makes the government more 
desirous of checking the decline in population in French 
Equatorial Africa and in stimulating the slow growth of the 
population of French West Africa. The birth-rate in West 
Africa is very high, but the infant mortality is said to be 
fifty per cent and even eighty per cent in some regions. 
And a country with over 12,000,000 people has been found 
scarcely able to supply the quota at first assigned of 15,500 
soldiers annually. French leaders, however, are not insist- 
ing that West Africa should at present give the maximum of 
assistance, military, financial, or economic, but rather that 
the colonial governments should so increase the well-being 
and contentment of the population and so develop the great 
potentialities of the eight colonies that they may become 
important factors in the great future which they see for 
Greater France.