PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS — SECTION E. II3 



to offer of the essential character and moral effect (in the wider 

 sense) of the rites, and how very little dispassionate study is 

 given to the matter. (My own discoveries I ventured to sub- 

 mit to you some years ago, as did Mr. Roberts for the Trans- 

 vaal recently). 



Early missionaries had to make a decision before the birth 



of ethnology, and that they did fearlessly, according to their 



light, however much their own immediate success was hindered. 



It may be that then was the time for trenchant severance from 



an evil inevitable legacy of past abuse. 



But now, I cannot help feeling, the native suffers grievous 

 loss of very much needed discipline, through the uprooting of the 

 landmarks of immemorial sanction, and I hope it may not be 

 too late to save some part of the structure of what is now recog- 

 nised, among serious students, as a highly respectable ethnic sys- 

 tem, in the face of the obvious failure of the effect to Euro- 

 peanise. 



Pray do not think me a Julian endeavouring to galvanise a 

 twice-dead heathenism ; it is just because I believe that true re- 

 ligion should find room, in most cases, for the pre-Christian 

 Ethic, and build upon it, that I regret the complete (and, I fear, 

 largely needless) ruin of the sanctions of the Bantu past. The 

 fact, which I emphasize again and again, is that we have too little 

 study of that past and its meaning, on the part of those who 

 have to guide policy, both in Church and State ; and even the 

 academic world is not allowed to contribute as it should to the 

 solution of the native problem. Academics themselves are now 

 awake to the need, but only partially, even they. I shall not for- 

 get the surprise of a Professor of a South African University 

 College, who was very deeply interested in totemism, when he 

 discovered from me, for the first time, that the totemists were at 

 his gate, as I called a native lad to him and asked him what he 

 danced — that is to say, his seboko. or " totem." I am only say- 

 ing in much oif this what Mr. Roberts said last year at greater 

 length and with greater effectiveness : " The work of the Chris- 

 tian missionary requires very special training, and, until this fact 

 is recognised by the churches, the results of their work among 

 the Bantu are bound to be disappointing and more or less of a 

 failure. The fault lies with those in authority. The training 

 should include the study of comparative ethnology." Note the 

 " comparative !" No true philology or ethnology can be other. 

 This is a practical matter, not an academic. If we break an arm 

 we choose a first-aider to help us, rather than one who says he 

 has the love of heaven or of mankind, if it has not led him to 

 learn duly the science of giving first aid, by studying bones and 

 muscles : a study which seems to the layman academic. So must 

 we study native cult and custom if we would best commend our 

 own. 



Dale, of Zanzibar, was able to tell some Moslem teachers 

 that the text they were quoting was not in the Koran but in a 



