280 COMMERCIAL PROSPECTS 



must often have resulted in their death from gangrene or loss of blood. 

 In the countries speaking the speech of Unyoro native custom positively 

 required the suicides of wives on their husbands' graves. But the warfare 

 that took place ! — the constant loss of life that was due to civil wars 

 or the aggressions on or by other states; raids from Uganda into Unyoro 

 to obtain extra wives for the chiefs, raids from Unyoro into Toro and 

 Ankole to snatch cattle and seize women ; then again, further east, 

 whole tribes wiped out of existence. This has occurred again and again. 

 The population of parts of Kavirondo on the slopes of Blount Elgon, of the 

 Nyando Valley, and of much of the Nandi Plateau has been absolutely 

 extinguished — men, women, and children being slain, and the remnant 

 starving to death in the bush. One can only say that in every district 

 there prevailed absolute insecurity for life or [)roperty. There may have 

 been the most carefully framed native laws and customs inflicting on the 

 negro's daily life an amount of etiquette which we should find intolerable : 

 but although these may have secured the law and order of a village, they 

 were no defence against aggression from a rival village, or the downward 

 swoop of some robber tribe who scarcely even felt tlie common tie of 

 humanity with the peaceful cultivators whose blood they shed with positive 

 enjoyment, whose halntations they laid waste, and whose cattle they stole. 

 Famines, epidemics of smallpox or of bubonic plague, attacks of a virulent 

 dysentery caused by bad water and semi-starvation, would slay here 

 6,000, here 10,000, elsewhere wipe out a whole nation, 'i'he cattle plague 

 would come down from the north, and since there was no central Govern- 

 ment to check it or to segregate infected herds, disease would wipe off all 

 the cattle from a country as large as Wales, reducing its inha])itants, who 

 had hitherto depended solely on the produce of their cattle, sheep, and 

 goats, to starvation or a disastrous emigration. 



As regards famines, I may he told that British rule in India has of 

 late been coincident with terrible famines. This is true : but tlie people 

 who put this forward do not stop to inquire how bad the famine would 

 have been if there were no British (rovernment, or whether the famine 

 could ever have taken place but for the enormous and unchecked increase 

 of population which has taken place under British rule, whereby India 

 possesses almost more inhabitants than she can sujiport. As regards Uganda 

 and Busoga and the countries to the north of Mount Elgon, where famine 

 has occurred since our acquaintance with those countries, it has been of a 

 kind which will be henceforth certainly j^reventable under a well-organised 

 Administration. Warfare and the deflection of cultivators to unprofitable 

 fighting was one reason. Partial failure of rain was another ; but this last 

 would have been of but little effect if the natives had been taught to 

 irrigate their fields from streams which never fail. 



