THE COUNTRY 351 
of the farmer living many days march from the railroad. 
When he does gain access to that road his difficulties are 
not over. There is only one little narrow-gauge line for 
all the country. The grades on it are very severe, ten 
small carriages or trucks are as much as an engine can draw. 
Freight rates are not as high as they were, but are still 
very high. Labour-saving farming machinery is out of 
question; no native could use it. If he works in the 
sun all day, he has only his two hands, and the sun kills. 
To break up his ground, to free it from a tropic luxuriance 
of weed, to sow and reap it, to carry his produce to the 
distant market, he is for all these dependent on native 
labour. His herds may have to be driven many miles 
to water, and if not watched at night and guarded by fires 
and thorn boma, they would soon disappear. 
Without a regular supply, then, of native labour and 
at a fixed price the farmer cannot live. But the farmer has 
an inevitable competitor in the Government itself. Noth- 
ing can be accomplished in the Protectorate without native 
labour. The roads, the stations, the Government works, 
the supplying of military and civil forces at distant and 
inaccessible points — all these require immense numbers 
of partially trained and disciplined natives. 
The East African is so important both to settler and 
official that there is often a scramble to get him, and 
he, while he is willing to work when starvation forces him 
to it, is apt, as soon as he has a rupee in the corner of his 
blanket, to try to avoid working for either Government 
or farmer. I am afraid it must be confessed that for him 
sefari life is not always a good thing. The wages he earns 
at it are much higher than the colonist can usually afford 
to give and it encourages his innate tendency to wander 
from place to place and from job to job. 
I have given the merest outline of the difficulties inci- 
dent to the employment of labour, but even that is enough 
