330 THE LAND OF THE LION 
Trenchant and true as this criticism is, it at once calls 
forth a counter criticism. If this is so, if such obviously 
wise and necessary courses have been habitually neglected, 
how do you account for the equally obvious advance the 
Protectorate has made? How is it that in spite of stupid, 
and worse than stupid, muddling in Uganda, the bloody 
buccaneering policy that was allowed to continue there 
for a time, in spite of the folly and injustice that drove the 
best quality of East Coast natives to leave the country and 
settle after the Mazuri Rebellion (1895) in German ter- 
ritory — how is it that the country can even hold its own? 
There is just one answer to this and only one. It is not 
that the Colonial Office has, so far at least, greatly improved 
on the management of its predecessor, the Foreign Office; 
it is not that in the service of the Protectorate the worth 
and work of the officer is now always acknowledged and 
he no longer has appointed over his head “‘the man with 
the pull,” it ought to be so, but as yet it is not so. But 
it is just this: that the ordinary young Englishman, 
employed by his country to do one of her difficult and 
thankless jobs in a distant land with but little to reward him 
and much to discourage him, zs the most honest, conscientious 
and successful civil servant in the world. In British East 
Africa he still comes out to a job too often unprepared, 
or but partially prepared, for it, having had scarcely a 
rudimentary education fitting him for it. He scarcely 
ever knows anything of the language when he lands. He 
is put often into positions where such knowledge should 
be a “‘sine qua non.” He, of course, makes many mistakes. 
I have often seen him on the magistrate’s bench or in his 
working room at an outlying Government Boma, struggling 
with his Swahili dictionary, or perspiring and patient 
while some native evidence slowly trickles its way through 
the confused and twisted channels of two native interpreters, 
Kikuyu into Swahili, Swahili into English, and so back 
