THE COUNTRY: 331 
again. He is moved about from one post to another, trans- 
ferred from a tribe he is just beginning to understand, and 
which on its part is just beginning to understand and trust 
him from a great district, that at the cost of real privation and 
sometimes sickness he has travelled over, to a tribe totally 
different in usages and language which he knows nothing 
about and to a new district, as unknown to him as the 
Sahara. His hard-won knowledge is all thrown away, 
and a new man, knowing nothing of his people, takes his 
job, to continue or not, as the case may be, those plans and 
policies that he and he alone had thought out and begun to 
put into operation. Still, somehow he does well. He has 
poor and uncertain support from Nairobi, and is often 
obliged to live in a climate that saps his health. He is 
poorly paid, he is wretchedly pensioned. Yet in a great 
majority of cases he is and does what an English gentleman 
is expected to be and do, for he comes from that recruiting 
ground for men of worth, the middle classes of England. 
The English civil servant in British East Africa, as 
everywhere else in the world, is a clean, honest, capable 
gentleman. He is the class of man that England above all 
the other nations has succeeded in rearing and binding to her 
service. A man, that under circumstances of loneliness, dis- 
heartenment and danger has done more than any other class, 
I don’t even except the soldier, to hold unbroken, in spite of 
its vast extension, what Kipling in an immortal verse has 
called her “far-flung battle line.”’ 
He should be better paid, he should be better pensioned, 
he should be better supported at his outpost. “‘Ah, there is 
no money,” “‘There are limits to the English taxpayers’ 
capacity to pay up margins of expenditure for unprofitable 
colonies.” Admitted! But one wrong is done him which 
might be quickly righted without the cost of an extra sover- 
eign. He should be listened to, and he 1s not. His reports 
are pigeon-holed when he is abroad, and when he comes 
