370 FUTURE PROSPECTS OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA part hi 



without any attempt to improve the resources of the country 

 by British administration, and to starve in periods of famine 

 unfed by British charity. It is this feeHng which leads me to 

 devote my last pages to the consideration of how far it would 

 be right and wise for England to undertake this task. 



The first essential for English administration is a climate in 

 which Englishmen can live. It must be admitted at the outset 

 that the sanitary record of the country is very bad, and recent 

 meteorological observations render this only too easy of ex- 

 planation. The death-roll of East Africa is simply appalling. 

 When I landed on the coast in November 1892 the Wesleyan 

 Missionary Society had five missionaries in British East Africa ; 

 when I returned to the coast in the August of the following 

 year, there was but one : two had died and two had been in- 

 valided home. In November 1892 there were seven English- 

 men in the districts administered from Lamu and from Melindi ; 

 there are only two left : two have been killed by natives 

 (Mr. J. Bell Smith and Mr. Hamilton), and three have died of 

 disease (Dr. Rae, Mr. W. Bird Thompson, and Mr. Edmonds). 

 When I started from Mombasa in March there were twelve 

 Europeans on or near the 300 miles of road between the coast 

 and Fort Smith ; before I returned to the coast five months 

 later, fever had killed three and sent one back as an invalid to 

 Europe ; of the remaining eight the Masai have murdered one, 

 and disease has carried away two more, so that only five of the 

 twelve are left. Moreover, it must be remembered that even 

 this fearful mortality — a rate of 23 per cent per annum — is the 

 death-rate of picked men in the prime of life. 



Nevertheless, in spite of this terrible record, which has been 

 impressed upon me by the fact that so many of those who have 

 died were friends, I believe that the climate is better than the 

 facts suggest. It is not fair to test a climate by its action upon 

 men enduring the hardships of camp life. If people in England 

 slept in swamps and lived on bad food ; if, when ill, they had 

 no shelter but a draughty tent and had to make a daily march 

 of ten miles or more across sandy plains, the death-rate would 

 be more than one in twenty. To show the influence of such 

 conditions on the deadliness of a disease, I may quote the ex- 

 perience of a friend who had to take a caravan of 300 men from 

 Uganda to the coast. A few days after leaving the last food 



