166 president's address — section f. 



probably be forgotten ; many setntentious platitudes would be 

 uttered about the necessity of setting an example and keeping 

 the native in his place, but it is likely that the pardon would be 

 withheld. 



The truth, of course, is that the native is a man, and not a 

 child; he has a man's passions and a man's power tO' hate and 

 love, but he is a very ignorant man, and he is a man whose 

 customs and ways of thought are strange to us, even in the rare 

 instances in which we try to understand them. And if we must 

 use the method of analogy we should argue not from the child, 

 but from the peasant, for, to quote Mr. Marett, it is the 

 peasant who "is the true middle term of the anthropological 

 cyllogism" (^" Psychology and FoIL-lore," p'. 19). 



" Direct" and "Indirect " Methods of Administration. 



Now, therei are twO' methods of governing these native races. One 

 is toi abolish all native customs and institutions of ©very kind, and 

 to introduce European customs and institutions in their place; 

 and the other is to conserve such of these customs as appear to be 

 useful or even harmless, and to make use of them, so far as may 

 be, as an instrument of good government. These methods have 

 been distinguished as the direct and the indirect method respec- 

 tively; the French, I believe, have favoured the former, and the 

 British, as a rule, the latter. Of course, neither method is exclu- 

 sive, and, equally, of course, their comparative merits have been 

 the subject of controversy. 



Instances of Direct and Indirect Methods. 



Perhaps the practical difference between these two methods can 

 be best illustrated by actual instances, so I will give an instance 

 of direct administration, taken from Miss Kingsley's Travels in 

 West Africa, and another of the indirect method from our own 

 administration of Papua. 



Miss Kingsley tells us of a black man called Joseph, in the 

 French Congo, who applied for a permit, or something of the sort, 

 and was cross-examined by the French officials as to the name of 

 his father. It appears that nobody cm the West Coast reckons 

 descent otherwise than through the mother, and Joseph did not 

 know, and had never had occasion to inquire into, the identitv 



of his father if he did know who he was he would take no interest 



in him, for each would regard the other as a stranger; and the 

 point ol Miss Kingsley's story is the insistence with which the 

 French regulations, made for a different race with different rules 

 of descent were applied to a people to whom paternal descent was 

 unknown.' {Vide Hartland Primitive Paternity, vol. i., p. 263.) 



This I consider tO' be an extreme instance of the direct method ; 

 and the other, which I take from Papua, is perhaps an extreme 

 instance of the indirect. It occurred when the small-pox scare 

 arose, some seven or eight years ago. 



