THE COUNTRY 359 
a modest fortune and on this he contentedly retires to 
his own country, taking every rupee he has made with him. 
Now the Hindi has been a necessity. He is a neces- 
sity still. His little trading shop exists everywhere under 
conditions which no white man’s shop could face. It has 
often proved an immense convenience. The Hindi who 
comes here, however, is not, so I am told by those who 
know India, the best sort of an Indian. Certainly the 
natives do not respect him. He degrades them and 
cheats them. Economically he may be a convenience, 
but morally he is a curse. 
His coming in the first instance was a necessity. The 
English policy of “‘muddle” had brought on the Uganda 
mutiny, and the home authorities, who could not be 
induced to spend a few thousand pounds to pay promptly 
the arrears due to an over-worked and underfed couple 
of battalions of expatriated Soudanese troops, came 
suddenly to the conviction that they would spend several 
million pounds to build a railroad, and so make sure of 
their hold on the rich Uganda land that had been so 
nearly lost to them. No preparations having been made, 
the work must be rushed through at all costs, though 
there was really no reason whatever to hurry. The little 
band in far-away Uganda had shed their blood freely, 
and Uganda and Englishmen, civilian, soldier and mis- 
sionary, had beaten that mutiny and had won out. But 
itis England’s way first to refuse to do anything and then 
to make up for lost time by trying to do everything at 
once; so the Uganda railroad was ordered to be rushed 
through. The ignorant and terrified tribes of the interior 
who had been harried for ages by slave hunters and who 
only managed to live in the country through which the 
railroad had to pass after leaving the coast by hiding their 
huts and villages in densest forest and thorn scrub, could 
not be induced to bring their labour. ‘Their refusal forced 
