THE COUNTRY 339 
fallacy should receive its death blow at the hands of the 
ruling executive, while unfortunately it has too often there 
been accepted and approved. The powers that be are 
used not so much to punish as to shield actual lawlessness; 
of incompetence I do not speak. Law-breaking officials 
must be shufiled out of the country, the aim being not to 
vindicate law in the keen eyes of the native, but to hush up 
scandal, to get bad men who have broken the law out of the 
country, to get them out as quickly as can be, but on no 
account to punish them. In German land a vehiee man 
goes to prison promptly. 
Englishmen may be slow to believe it, but this policy 
is in actual operation to-day and it is as foolish and as 
shortsighted as it is unmoral. No Government any- 
where under the sun, in past times or in present, gained 
anything by following it, and it is, thank God, opposed 
to all Anglo-Saxon history and tradition. 
The education of the native tribes is the immediate 
need of the land. When I speak of the education of 
the native I am far indeed from wishing to imply that 
the wild children of the land should be taught and put 
to school. I use the word in its widest sense. I mean 
the training, the helping, the compelling of the native to 
fit himself gradually to those new conditions that inevit- 
ably follow the white man’s occupation of the country. 
Justice, common justice to him, demands as much at 
the white mans’ hands. 
The education he needs can only be given him when 
first a thorough and sympathetic study has been made 
of him and of his environment, of his past as well as of 
his present. And it is just here that the well-intentioned 
educators and missionaries of former days made their 
mistakes, and courted and won failure, failure for them- 
selves and the wards they loved, but loved unwisely. 
Africa is a land of failures; we have as yet no knowledge 
