260 THE SPECIAL COMMISSION, ETC. 



Cominerce will induce the native to develop the resources of his own 

 land in order that he make money by the sale of its products. He will 

 also be able to do work for the foreign merchants and settlers, and thus 

 earn money by a reasonable degree of toil. So long, however, as the 

 natives set themselves resolutely to maintain the Protectorate and a 

 civilised administration over their territories, so long I consider that the 

 Administration should uphold native interests and welfare first of all. 



Concurrently with the work carried on by this Special Commission, the 

 construction of the Uganda Eailway, which had been commenced in 1896, 

 was rapidly bringing a great influence to bear on the affairs of' the 

 Uganda Protectorate. The construction of the railway did not proceed as 

 easily and quickly as was at first hoped, and the expense of its con- 

 struction had greatly exceeded the original estimates. This was due, in 

 the first place, to the absence of any really certain and scientific informa- 

 tion regarding the country which the railway was to traverse. With the 

 exception of Sir John Kirk, no one on the Eailway Committee had had 

 any knowledge from personal experience of inner Africa, and the engineers 

 selected for the designing and construction of the line were only hitherto 

 acquainted with India, Mexico, and other tropical countries where the local 

 conditions are really very different to the deserts, steppes, swamps, rainy 

 plateaux, and crumbling mountains which intervene between the sea-coast 

 at Mombasa and the shores of the Victoria IS'yanza. ^^'hether the Govern- 

 ment of the day would have done better to have sought for trained 

 assistance from the colonial Government of such African colonies as Natal 

 is a point worth arguing by those whose only idea is to find fault with 

 any considerable enterprise of this kind undertaken by a Government 

 department. The chief engineer and manager appointed from the first — 

 Mr, George Whitehouse ; his second in command. My. Eawsou ; and their 

 colleagues on the engineering staff have patiently gra})pled with every 

 difficulty in turn, and have amply justified their original selection. The 

 work they have accomplislied is a splendid one. 



Although it would appear now, on the strength of reports published by 

 the Foreign Office itself, that with omniscience and no engineering strike 

 in England the Uganda Eailway could have been constructed for about 

 £750,000 less than it has eventually cost, and it is clear that the former 

 estimates as to time were far too fiivourable, it is nearly as certain that had 

 any private company undertaken the railway it would have fallen into just 

 the same blunders, and perhaps have ended half-way to the lake in hopeless 

 bankruptcy. The great difficulty which attended tlie first four years of 

 railway construction was the almost total absence of local labour. The coast 

 population of East Africa did not care for work on the railway or for steady 



